


Pygmalion

by selfreliantscientist



Category: Welcome to Night Vale
Genre: Carlos is a Computer Programmer, Cecil is Text-to-Voice Software, Gen, M/M, More Angst than originally intended, Named More for the Greek Myth than the Play
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-10-25
Updated: 2015-04-18
Packaged: 2017-12-30 11:47:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 30
Words: 61,085
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1018239
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/selfreliantscientist/pseuds/selfreliantscientist
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Carlos has been assigned a fascinating piece of software to test and finish. He likes making it say nice things about him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Pilot

“Hello, Carlos.”

That was the first thing the voice ever said. Carlos thought he’d go for something a little more personal than the traditional “Hello, world.” Not that it mattered. This was just a test, after all, taking some software that had been part of an abandoned company project and seeing if there was anything that could be done with it.

The software had some sliders that could be used to change the pitch and timbre of the voice. Carlos played around with them for a while, listening to “Hello, Carlos” said by a variety of virtual people, before he went back to the random settings that the program had been on when Carlos opened it. He liked that voice the most. It was rich, deep and smooth. Carlos thought for a moment about what other things he should have it say.

“Hello, perfect, beautiful Carlos.”

For a moment Carlos smiled to himself, completely unselfconscious. Almost immediately, though, he remembered where he was, and looked around to see if there was anyone near enough to his cubicle to have heard that. There was no one visible, so relaxed again and put on a pair of headphones. Really, if he was going to be working with audio, it made sense to wear headphones anyway.

It was a pretty neat piece of software. Carlos gave it Jeff Winger’s speech from the first episode of _Community_ , and sent that audio to his boss, along with an invitation to experiment with words and phrases, because the best way to get an idea of what the software was capable of was to use it. The next day, he arrived at work to find his boss’ reply.

_Carlos,_

_I‘m excited about the potential applications for this software. I’d like to have you test its capabilities. Find its limits and tweak them and push it farther than it can go right now. I think we have the potential for a text-to-speech converter that could fully mimic the range and subtleties of the human voice._

_I’ll send you lists of words and phrases that I’d like you to get it to say. It’s important to keep them as part of sentences. I’m particularly concerned about phrases that consist of common words. For example, it can say “dog” just fine, as well as “park,” but when I tried to get it to say “dog park” it just came out weird._

_Anyway, here’s the first list. If you could get it to say these as parts of sentences and make sure it doesn’t sound too stilted, that’d be great. It it does sound stilted, let me know what needs to happen to make it stop. Ideally you’ll be able to handle those issues yourself, but just let me know if we need to get another programmer, or even a full team, on board. Of course, if we need more than one or two other people, it might not be worth it to the company to keep going, so bear that in mind._

_The list:_  
 _Sheriff_  
 _Police_  
 _Children_  
 _Kids_  
 _Angels_  
 _Heavens_  
 _Desert_  
 _Secret_  
 _Helicopters_  
 _Alligators_  
 _Gatorade_  
 _Light Bulb_

_I’m also interested in seeing about inflections. Can you make it sound like it’s asking a question? And what about inflecting a particular word differently on repetition, for emphasis or other effects?_

_Get back to me as soon as you can._

_\--Al_

Carlos got to work, writing up sentences that combined as many of the prescribed words as he could. To make the job less tedious, he tied the sentences together, writing brief snippets. Nothing too extensive, no more than a paragraph or so at a time. They wound up about the same length and level of detail as minor news stories. That thought amused Carlos, so he kept it going.

When the voice spoke, it sounded both ominous and disconcertingly chipper. The difference in tone from one sentence to the next could be unsettling. Carlos would have to do something about that… tweak the algorithms that governed intonation somehow… but for the meantime, he just went along with it. His silly news stories just got more and more ominous as he wrote more, especially when he got to the bit about the dog park.

It took some work to get the program to say “dog park” with anything sounding like a human speech pattern. When Carlos finally got it to sound vaguely acceptable, it still wasn’t quite right. No human would say the phrase “dog park” while sounding quite so foreboding. So, when Carlos wrote some sentences to show off how well the thing could say “dog park,” he tried to make them match the weird, misplaced gravitas that the voice imbued to that phrase.

Carlos really enjoyed listening to the voice, hearing its mellifluous tones read off the sentences he’d written for it. And since he was having fun anyway with his fake news stories, he wrote himself into some of them. _And_ , because he was already messing around with surreal fantasy imagery, he figured he might as well turn the version of himself that the software would talk about into a fantasy.

Hearing praises of himself come out of the speech synthesizer made Carlos happier than it probably should have. After every few paragraphs of “real” work, he’d give himself a break and make the voice say something about him. He liked having it describe him as some irresistible figure, with a strong jaw and straight teeth and perfect hair. No one would have used those descriptors for him in real life, but it was nice to think of himself as having those qualities, even if just for a couple of minutes at a time while he worked on this project.

He exported the audio in snippets, leaving out the parts about himself. His boss didn’t need to hear that.

_Al,_

_Here are some sample sentences. I think this is a pretty good illustration of the software’s current capabilities in regards to the things you asked me about. I’ve got some more audio I could send you if you want to get more thorough, but I figured I’d keep things brief for you right now._

_There’s a lot of potential in the software, I agree. I’d love to make it my new project and tweak it however you feel is necessary until we have a finished product._

_\--Carlos_

He attached the following pieces of audio to the email.

“The City Council announces the opening of a new dog park at the corner of Earl and Somerset, near the Ralphs. They would like to remind everyone that dogs are not allowed in the dog park. People are not allowed in the dog park.” 

“Are the unmarked helicopters circling the area black? Probably world government. Not a good area for play that day. Are they blue? That’s the Sheriff’s Secret Police. They’ll keep a good eye on your kids, and hardly ever take one.”

“Remember, Gatorade is basically soda, so give your kids plain old water, and maybe some orange slices when they play.”

“She is offering to sell the old light bulb, which has been touched by an angel.”

“It’s easy to forget in this hot, hot, hot desert climate, but things would actually be slightly harder for us without the sun.”

“The City Council would like me to remind you about the tiered heavens, and the hierarchy of angels. The reminder is that you should not know anything about this.”

“And now for a brief public service announcement: Alligators. Can they kill your children? Yes.”

Al didn’t hear Carlos’ favorite piece of audio. It was one where Carlos was mentioned, and besides, it didn’t use any of the words that had been on the list. Carlos had written it when he was almost done with his samples and just wanted to give himself a quick break for something fun before he finished up and passed on the audio.

“Carlos looked nervous. I’ve never seen that kind of look on someone with that strong of a jaw.”

He shivered. It was ridiculous, the effect that voice had on him.

Before Carlos left that day, he exported audio from everything he’d put together as one file. He copied it over to a flash drive so that the voice could keep him company when he got home.


	2. Glow Cloud

_Carlos,_

_Here are the words I’d like to hear this time around._

_Snow_  
Radon  
Glowing  
Glow Cloud  
Animal  
Animals  
Armadillos  
Lion  
Dragon  
Crows  
Lizards  
Breathtaking 

_It would be great if we could get some names, too. Louis, Hiram, John, whatever. I don’t really have a specific list, but I’m interested in seeing how versatile the software is with regard to proper nouns. Could you also have it do the days of the week?_

_Oh, and I’d like to see how it handles parentheticals (you know, like this)._

_Thanks,_

_Al_

Carlos was certain that “Glow” and “Cloud” were meant to be on separate lines, but he got too much of a kick out of imagining what a “Glow Cloud” would be like to care.

“Glow Cloud.” It sounded so ominous, Carlos couldn’t help but giggle.

“All hail the mighty Glow Cloud,” he made the software say. Then, to try to get it as ominous-sounding as possible, he messed around with the sliders, making the voice deeper, coarser, until it sounded like it had gone into some sort of a trance.

Almost all of the sample sentences he sent in to Al had to do with the Glow Cloud. It was just too funny to do anything else. He hoped Al wouldn’t mind, wouldn’t think Carlos was poking fun at him for the error in the list.

On a whim, Carlos made the things he had the voice say continuous with the last samples he’d sent along. He doubted that would be noticeable… after all, he only sent bits and pieces, leaving his superiors completely unaware that there was a whole to which those bits and pieces belonged.

He did encounter a bug. As requested, he’d included some names, as well as a parenthetical. But after the voice had said “John Peters (you know, the farmer)” once, it couldn’t seem to say “John Peters” without including the rest of it. Carlos tried exiting the program and opening it again, tried restarting his computer, tried erasing the file that contained “John Peters (you know, the farmer)” but somehow the software held onto that one phrase.

Carlos included the bug and examples of it in his email, but Al didn’t seem too concerned, and told him not to spend too much of his time on it, to focus on testing other aspects of the software.

_It’s not like the program’s crashing or anything. It probably won’t be that persistent or much of a big deal. I’m sure the (you know, the farmer) bit won’t last._

_\--Al_


	3. Station Management

Al wanted Carlos to try to get some emotion into the voice.

_Make it sound angry. Make it sound scared. Just… give it some pathos. It’s so steady and unaffected… listening to it too long gives me the creeps._

Carlos didn’t find the voice creepy… He could listen to it for hours on end, feeling nothing but fascination and entirely too much fondness. But he understood what Al was saying. Emotional resonance was still lacking.

Getting the voice to emulate an emotional response proved difficult. Carlos wrote sentences for it, sentences that, taken on face value, seemed that they would be said by someone terrified for his life or brimming with rage, but when he had the voice say them, he found that he could get creeped out by it, after all.

It wasn’t monotone, but it was clipped, and calm, and completely at odds with the tone of what Carlos had written.

He tried to make adjustments. He moved sliders, tried to make the voice breathier, tried to make it sound choked and desperate, but as he wrote about sinister government fronts and missing interns, he just couldn’t keep a straight face. The tone of the voice was completely inappropriate, but after trying and failing to get it to sound, at the very least, convincingly concerned, he found that he actually kind of liked listening to this flat, unflappable voice describe impossible and uncomfortable things.

The complaints about traffic came out hilariously disaffected, and Carlos couldn’t bring himself to ruin it by trying to imbue the voice with road rage.

Over lunch, Carlos explained his problem to Julie from accounting.

Carlos was just about the only programmer who got along with the people in the accounting division. About a year earlier there’d been an issue with payroll sending out checks for 1/10th of the appropriate amount. Carlos had been the only one to complain without shouting or making someone’s life hell for the day. He’d just walked into the accounting office and said, “Hey, I think there’s a decimal error on my paycheck. And not the kind that would have me cashing this baby and skipping town.”

They still thought of him as “Guy who was funny instead of jumping on our throats,” and sometimes that could go a long way in an office environment.

“You know what I think,” said Julie, rhetorically. “I think you need to find something that actually inspires an emotional reaction in you. You’re not taking this seriously, because you’re having it talk about things that are abstract. You don’t care about some theoretical floating cat or an intern being disappeared by the World Government. What’s something that actually scares you?”

After a moment’s thought, Carlos answered, “HR.”

Julie laughed. “Okay, probably not that. And if that doesn’t work, think about what makes you angry. There’s gotta be something that can get you into an emotional state.”

Carlos thought about this when he was back in his cubicle. There wasn’t a lot that scared him. He was scared of scorpions, but that was more of a situational thing, kind of hard to get into while he was safe in an office. He was scared of lidless eyes staring at him, but he thought he’d gone into enough surreal and disturbing imagery without taking that step.

So then he looked to anger. Carlos was a pretty even-tempered guy. He didn’t get angry a whole lot. Even when they’d accidentally given him a 90% pay cut, he’d laughed it off. He tried to remember the last time he’d really gotten angry.

It must have been when Steve--

No. Carlos was not going to think about the breakup. There’s a place for catharsis and that place is not work.

Something less angering, something further off and more harmless, but something which had still affected him.

Out of nowhere, Carlos remembered his last haircut.

It had been awful, way too short and not uniformly so. Carlos had hated it, had regretted ever getting it done, had felt like everyone was staring at him for weeks afterward. He hadn’t gotten his hair cut since, and it was now unruly and longer than he liked it, but he told himself that it was handsomely tousled. It _wasn’t,_ but that’s what he told himself.

He had the voice complain about his haircut. At first, of course, the voice kept its clipped, emotionless enunciation. Carlos couldn’t help his internal sense of amusement, and he imagined the voice barely controlling a bubbling sense of rage just below the surface. Fairly quickly, Carlos got distracted by having the voice call his hair gorgeous and beautiful. “Thick black hair, not to ignore the dignified, if premature, touch of grey at the temples,” he had the voice say.

Carlos knew his hair was unkempt and that the grey made him look older than he was, but if he had the voice say that it was beautiful, he could almost believe it himself.

Listening to glowing descriptions of his own physical appearance was much more entertaining than making the voice sound angry, and Carlos decided to move on to something that he could make better progress with. Anger was throwing up roadblocks, so he went back to working on fear.

Having thought it over, he decided that, whatever Julie said, maybe being scared of HR _wasn’t_ such a bad place to find his inspiration. Al was the only one who’d be listening, and he had a decent sense of humor.

Carlos made up a version of HR that was as terrifying as he could imagine, and spent the rest of the day getting the voice to sound more and more fearful. By the time he was done for the day, he thought he’d gotten a cowardly whimper pretty well emulated.

He just hoped HR wouldn’t stumble onto the audio somehow, and take offense at the unsympathetic portrayal of “Station Management.” Those people were terrifying.


	4. PTA Meeting

The latest instructions from Al were confusing. He wanted Carlos to make the voice say “pt words.” When Carlos requested clarification, Al had only said “You know, words that start with ‘pt.’ I don’t know how to make that any clearer.”

Carlos thought that providing some examples of “pt” words would be helpful, but Al was in the middle of some sort of upper-level negotiation that Carlos wasn’t privy to, and communication between the two of them was sparse that week.

There were only three “pt” words that Carlos could think of. Two meant the same thing, and one wasn’t even a word, just an abbreviation. Still, Al wasn’t available for further consultation, so Carlos set to work with what he had.

Even if writing about pteranodons/pterodactyls attacking a PTA meeting was a little on the ridiculous side.

Then again, compared to the surreal humor he’d used in previous tests/demonstrations, it probably wouldn’t seem that out of place.

“Last night’s Night Vale PTA meeting ended in bloodshed, as a rift in space-time split open in the Main Street recreation center auditorium, setting loose several confused and physically aggressive pteranodons.”

“The final missing pterodactyl has been returned to its own timeline in either prehistoric or alternate-universe Night Vale.”

He was done pretty quickly, and, knowing that Al wouldn’t get a chance to listen to any audio for at least another day, he just kept writing more about the dinosaurs and the PTA meeting and the collision of the two.

And then, as was becoming habit, he made the voice talk about himself.

Carlos envisioned himself as the hero of an action movie, seeing an issue that no one else would acknowledge and selflessly throwing himself into danger to save them all.

“Carlos, beautiful Carlos, tragically shorn of his locks, reportedly was the only dissenting voice, but it is not clear that he actually opposed the measure, as the minutes only report him stating, ‘There is no time! No more time!’ into a black rectangle in his hand, and then running, winded, from the community hall. According to Old Woman Josie, he was still absolutely perfect, and smelled of lavender chewing gum.”

He wondered if he would eventually get tired of making the voice praise him. He would have expected the novelty to wear off, but it was still as potent as when he’d first made it say “Hello, perfect, beautiful Carlos.” Maybe even more so. It had definitely grown on him. He’d got his computer to say “Hello, Carlos” in that voice whenever he turned it on. (He’d left out the “perfect and beautiful” part, because someone else could conceivably need to turn on his work computer at some point and he wanted to avoid the awkward conversation, or the awkward avoidance of that conversation.)

Without a list or a challenge from Al, Carlos felt directionless. Much as he enjoyed playing with the software and seeing what it could do, when left to his own devices he didn’t think of much that seemed worth doing.

Before Carlos called it a day and sent Al the few snippets he had, he did think to check his spelling. The focus here was on audio, but he wouldn’t want the transcript to embarrass him. A quick Google search for pteranodon and pterodactyl would be sufficient.

He got to the Wikipedia article on pteranodons first, and was surprised to find that, apparently, they weren’t the same thing as pterodactyls. Carlos had always used the words interchangeably, when he had cause to use them at all.

Well, he didn’t want to go back and change what he’d done (amazing how an attitude of “I don’t have enough work to do” can turn so quickly into “I don’t want to do any more work”) so he just wrote an extra piece and inserted it into the middle. Maybe Al would buy it as an intentional error and correction within the narrative of the sample audio. More likely, Al wouldn’t even notice or care.

“Secret Police are now reporting that the offending beasts were not pteranodons after all, but pterodactyls. Also, pteranodons aren’t even dinosaurs as this station previously stated, just winged reptiles that lived about 70 million years after pterodactyls.”

But maybe, just maybe, Al would appreciate learning this little tidbit about prehistoric animal classification.

Carlos also realized, thanks to Wikipedia, that “pterosaur” was another “pt” word he could use. He was already going a little overboard on the prehistoric flying reptiles, though, so he let it go.


	5. The Shape in Grove Park

The voice wasn’t real.

It was a digital simulation of a human voice. The man who spoke those lovely words about Carlos did not exist. He wouldn’t even be saying those things if Carlos hadn’t instructed him to.

Carlos didn’t know when he’d started thinking of the voice as a “he” instead of an “it,” but he was certain it wasn’t a good sign. Clearly, Carlos was letting his imagination get away with him, and he would have to put a stop to it. The voice _was not real_.

The difficulty was in Carlos getting himself to accept that fact. He could tell himself that the voice wasn’t real, and on a basic, surface level he knew it to be true, but he couldn’t make himself believe it.

He just didn’t view himself as a trustworthy source of information. Not like the voice.

Carlos could tell himself he was attractive--he’d tried doing affirmations for a while--but he never really bought the things he said. When he made the voice call him perfect, though, he could actually accept the idea that maybe he _was_. Maybe his hair _was_ beautiful. Not because Carlos said it to himself, but because Carlos had made the voice say it to him. The voice had power.

If Carlos didn’t believe himself when he said that the voice wasn’t real… maybe Carlos would believe it if he made the _voice_ tell him that the voice wasn’t real.

So he gave the voice an existential crisis. He listened to it wondering about the nature of its own existence, and the presence or absence of others in its little world. It stung, hearing the voice doubt its reality. Carlos didn’t _want_ to hear that the voice didn’t exist. But he felt it was something he had to do.

 

Al’s list was short, this time around. It included:

Tarantualas  
Rita Hayworth  
Solipsistic  
Hispanic

For the most part, Carlos kept those phrases out of his effort to convince himself to stop treating the voice like a real person. However, it was impossible not to include the word “solipsistic” in a rant about being alone and speaking to a world that, possibly, was just imaginary.

That world _was_ imaginary. That was the whole point; Carlos was forcing himself to confront, through the voice’s acknowledgment, that he had constructed something to amuse himself and that the construction wasn’t real and never would be. But…

After listening to the voice speak, with a noticeable touch of fear (which, Carlos should have been proud to admit, he had managed to simulate quite convincingly), about the nature of its own nonexistence…

It was too much.

He meant to keep going, to have the voice tell him, in no uncertain terms, that it was a fabrication and should not be treated as a real person. But listening to the first steps along that realization, just having the voice suggest that maybe it wasn’t quite part of the real world, almost brought tears to Carlos’ eyes. He managed not to start crying in the middle of his workplace, but just barely, and he decided that he couldn’t keep going. Instead, he resolved the existential crisis with a confirmation of the voice’s reality. He didn’t want to hear the voice tell him the truth, not in this case. He wanted the opposite. If he wasn’t strong enough to handle breaking the fantasy, then he would reinforce it.

“Leland’s existence, as well as his finally speaking about the Shape that No One Else Would Speak About, has reassured me greatly about my lonely and solipsistic vigil here at this microphone.”

Leland. That was a name that Carlos had got off a randomly generated name list. Al still wanted to test the software’s ability to pronounce different names, but just rattling off whole lists of them defeated the conversational purpose of the software, so Carlos tried to include two or three names in each batch of sample audio he sent off.

Lots of the names were of interns because mentioning an intern doing something was a reasonably easy way to drop a name into the text. And the interns kept dying because that was a reasonably easy way to justify there being so many freaking interns.

Carlos wondered if maybe he’d be more okay with treating the voice like a real person if he gave it a name. He’d considered naming the voice before, but he hadn’t found one that sounded right. Every time he plugged a name into the software to hear it, he decided it didn’t fit. Those names went to interns and assorted made-up townspeople.

It had been too long. The voice needed a name. Carlos grabbed the next name off the randomized list and plugged it in, listening to the voice pronounce it.

“Cecil.”

Carlos shivered like he hadn’t since the first day he’d spent listening to the voice. _Cecil_. Yes, Cecil could work.

He wrote a full sentence with the voice acknowledging its name.

“This is Cecil, generally, speaking to you, metaphorically, for Night Vale Community Radio.”

The voice wasn’t real, but, Carlos thought, that didn’t matter. He had Cecil to talk to him, and that was enough.


	6. The Drawbridge

Al wanted Cecil to say the signs of the Zodiac. Al didn’t know that the voice was named Cecil, but he wanted to hear it pronounce the names of twelve constellations all the same. The obvious way for Carlos to accommodate this request was to write a fake horoscope.

The thought of just copying a horoscope from a newspaper or the like didn’t actually occur to him.

Carlos hadn’t looked at a horoscope since he’d been with Steve. It wasn’t something Carlos took seriously. He’d mostly been content to totally ignore the existence of astrology.

Steve, though, got really into it. He’d read his horoscope just about every day. When Carlos was with him, he’d also read Carlos’. For the most part, Carlos had tried to listen amicably, even though he felt the whole thing was a waste of time. Eventually, towards the end of their relationship, it had become a point of contention, and they hadn’t been able to get through a morning without arguing about whether the stars really had anything to say about either of their lives.

Just the thought of those pointless arguments brought back a significant portion of Carlos’ resentment towards Steve. When he got to Scorpio, which was Steve’s sign, he couldn’t help writing something vindictive.

“Curse you! Curse your family! Curse your children! And your children’s children! Vile, vile Scorpio.”

Hearing Cecil emphatically curse Steve’s astrological sign felt far too good. So good, in fact, that Carlos decided to take a break from fake horoscopes and write some more direct defamations of Steve.

He chuckled to himself as he made Cecil decry Steve’s poor automobile maintenance. He imagined revisiting that old argument, but this time playing that audio and saying, “See, Steve? Cecil agrees with me.” Of course, that fantasy didn’t bear out much thought, because explaining to your ex-boyfriend that you’ve got a software-generated voice named Cecil and it says whatever you want it to would be awkward in and of itself, and besides, since Cecil just said what Carlos told him to say, it didn’t actually count as an outside confirmation of his opinion.

Still, having his position affirmed was comforting.

Carlos kept writing, crossing words off the non-zodiac list Al had sent him. “Facebook,” “Drawbridge,” “Pinkberry,” “Sports Arena,” “Contact Lenses” – oh wait, that one gave Carlos a horoscope idea. He finished up the zodiac signs.

Instead of giving himself some sort of fake prediction, either jokingly terrible or self-mockingly optimistic, he settled for an ordinary reminder. “Cancer: I’ve gotta pay my phone bill, and also get some more milk.” He added in a little note about that genuinely being the horoscope, but overall it was the equivalent of writing “phone bill + milk” on the back of his hand.

It _was_ , however, a great reminder, and Carlos did remember to pay his phone bill and buy milk after work.

While still at work, he wrote about a new Pinkberry opening in Night Vale. Cecil worked, he’d determined when he first made the decision to pretend to be writing a radio news program, back before Cecil was even named Cecil, for a radio station in a city called Night Vale. The city, not entirely coincidentally, shared a name with the company called Night Vale, where Carlos worked.

He’d been using the software to poke fun at their competitor, Desert Bluffs, for almost as long as he’d been using the software at all.

In the imaginary little world Carlos had set up, where he was a handsome, daring scientist and the sonorous Cecil was in love with him, Desert Bluffs was a rival city to Night Vale.

Carlos harbored no real resentment towards Desert Bluffs. It was just a company doing roughly the same thing that his own company did. If circumstances had been slightly different a few years ago, Carlos could have been working for Desert Bluffs instead of Night Vale. The Night Vale job offer had arrived two days earlier than the one from Desert Bluffs, and had already been accepted. At the time, he hadn’t thought it made any real difference.

Now, Carlos was glad he’d gone to work for Night Vale, because otherwise he wouldn’t have Cecil.

So it was with a mild sense of company pride that Carlos made Cecil deride rival city Desert Bluffs and their hideous sports arena. While Carlos was at it, if Cecil was deriding Desert Bluffs, he may as well deride Steve in the same breath. Carlos could think of no worse insult to Desert Bluffs than declaring that Steve belonged there.

Carlos was tapping into his more vindictive nature. He usually kept that side of him pretty well under wraps, but… well, Steve _deserved_ his ire, and it’s not like Carlos’ words and Cecil’s voice were actually hurting anyone. Having taken a few small steps, Carlos decided it would be okay to indulge in a full-out revenge fantasy.

“Apparently, the Sheriff’s Secret Police agree with me about old Steve Carlsberg, dear listeners. We just received a report from a reliable witness that two days ago, Steve was whisked into the back of a windowless van, only to reappear earlier this morning, wearing thick head bandages and eating styrofoam shaped like an ice cream cone.”

He wasn’t sure which he enjoyed more, hearing Cecil call him perfect, or hearing Cecil report horrible things happening to Steve. They were both wonderful in their own ways.


	7. History Week

Carlos was browsing Facebook at work. He wasn’t allowed to browse Facebook at work. Facebook was blocked from all company computers.

The block was pretty easy to get around, though, if you knew what you were doing. And Carlos was more than a little good with computers. And he more than a little needed a break.

Al had given him an actual news story to have Cecil read it for a demonstration. Carlos didn’t know what kind of demonstration it was. He’d just copied over the text and listened for errors, making a few adjustments to make Cecil sound more natural.

The news story in question was about metal detectors being installed in some high school, apparently as a measure to combat gang violence in the school. Local parents had protested that their kids wouldn’t be able to defend themselves against violence if they didn’t have weapons with them. It was depressing, and Carlos was trying to cheer himself up on Facebook in the time it took Al to get back to him.

The first link he clicked on didn’t help. It was an article about an artist named Kara Walker. There were some pictures of her work, and it was… beautiful, certainly, and powerful, but not in the least bit uplifting. Images of slavery and oppression were not what Carlos needed to see right then.

The next link was better. This one was about a group of self-identified witches living in England at the time of World War II, who had done spells in order to assist their country’s war efforts. There were some compelling correlations between the dates of the spells and certain Allied victories, which of course meant nothing as correlation does not imply causation, but it was fun to think about.

Al replied. He didn’t say anything specific about the news article, but he did say that he’d noticed the program would read off any given year as a direct number. 1776 would be “one thousand seven hundred and seventy-six” instead of “seventeen seventy-six.” Al wanted Carlos to do something about that, to improve the program’s contextual recognition of dates so that it could read them as such.

So Carlos rattled off a few years and had the program read them. He gave them context and he thought it worked out okay. To tie them all together, he came up with “history week,” and enjoyed thinking up all sorts of unexpected twists on standard historical events.

Every once in a while, he thought back on his revenge fantasy regarding Steve. He had a specific image for how Steve had wound up, but he wasn’t really sure how he imagined Steve _getting_ there. While he was writing a twisted version of the Constitutional Convention, and imagining the sorts of things that might be in the City of Night Vale’s charter documents, such as provisions for the regulation and funding of the Sheriff’s Secret Police, the idea of reeducation jumped into his head.

_That_ was what had happened to Steve, Carlos decided. And, because the idea of reeducation as a regular event, occurring at odd intervals in most Night Vale citizens’ lives, was such a fun one, he threw in a bit about Cecil going in for reeducation as well. He didn’t relish the thought of sending Cecil to the same sorry fate as Steve. In fact, after he wrote the line, he didn’t give it much thought. It was just a throwaway gag.

That story about the high school metal detectors stuck with him, weighing on his mind. He found himself writing a satirical version, an absurdly exaggerated situation wherein the children were heavily armed and their parents saw nothing wrong with their active militarism. He did not send that audio to Al. He suspected that Al would not find it as funny or cathartic as Carlos did. But Carlos felt a little better to have written it.


	8. The Lights in Radon Canyon

Officially, it was none of Carlos’ business why Al was making him write tons of stuff about Pink Floyd for the next Cecil demonstration. Carlos had never been to one of the actual demonstrations. He had no idea what they were like, or who, aside from Al, heard the audio that Carlos sent along. He didn’t know whether Al was receiving input from others that he sent back to Carlos, or whether everything the program had said so far was based on the whims of one overworked manager and one bored programmer.

Al was a huge Pink Floyd fan, Carlos knew. And if he wanted to hear Cecil talk about his favorite band, well, who was Carlos to judge? There was something special about listening to Cecil say the things you wanted him to.

There was something special about hearing Cecil express admiration for Carlos.

Even as he had Cecil talk about flickering lights and describe the way Carlos thought Pink Floyd music sounded -- “unintelligible noises -- possibly some form of coded communication” -- he couldn’t resist the urge to also have Cecil regretfully lament a lack of discussion of “dinner or weekend plans.” This bit wouldn’t go to Al. It was mean about Pink Floyd and it mentioned Carlos by name and it was entirely too personal.

It was nice, though, to hear Cecil praising Carlos’ car. It made a pleasant counterpoint to the previous complaints about Steve’s poor automobile maintenance practices.

There was something special about hearing Cecil express admonishment for Steve.  


Carlos stopped paying any attention to whether Cecil’s comments about Steve made any sense. The real Steve didn’t have any children, but this effigy of Steve that Carlos constructed for Cecil to heap detractions upon was, more to his discredit, a failure as a PTA member as well as at car maintenance and obeying the city of Night Vale’s arcane laws.

Carlos felt a sort of impish glee at making Cecil decry Steve’s baking and his grammar, as Steve had always been inordinately proud of his scones (which, if Carlos was being honest, were fine, for scones. Carlos just didn’t like scones very much) and was more likely to complain about Carlos’ grammar than the other way around. He knew that if Steve were to hear Cecil say those things he’d just about lose it, which made him briefly entertain the notion of sending the audio to Steve. But, of course, Steve would be baffled about as much as he’d be annoyed, and really Carlos should stop entertaining the notion of contacting Steve just to get back at him.

Carlos finished with about an hour left in his work day, so he went back to the way he’d spent his free time at work for the past couple of weeks: re-reading short stories that he remembered from high school. The next one on his list was “The Yellow Wallpaper.”


	9. PYRAMID

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In the last chapter, I was trying to imply something without being too obvious about it. Based on comments, I think I went too far in the other direction and wound up being too subtle.
> 
> People seem to have focused on the mention of "The Yellow Wallpaper," which in retrospect makes sense because it was literally the last thing in the chapter. However, "The Yellow Wallpaper" was not intended to be all that significant.
> 
> Episode 8 of Welcome to Night Vale contains a rather direct allusion to another short story, "The Lottery" by Shirley Jackson. I read that story in high school, and when I was writing the previous chapter, I thought that maybe Carlos had read that story in high school too, and that it was on his mind while he was writing things up for Cecil to say. But then I wanted to imply that subtly, so I mentioned a _different_ short story that I read in high school, in the same class and at about the same time as I read "The Lottery." I associate those two stories with each other, so when I think of one I think of the other. Of course, I shouldn't have assumed that _everyone_ has the same association between those stories.
> 
> [I'm telling you right now](http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/WordOfGod) that Carlos had just read "The Lottery" before the previous chapter takes place. It says in the chapter that he read "The Yellow Wallpaper." Those things both happened, and whether they'll ever have any further relevance, only time will tell.

Masturbating while thinking about something work related was a terrible idea.

Carlos knew this. He didn’t let it stop him.

He had, at this point, well over two hours’ worth of audio that he’d brought home. Today, he’d started playing it pretty much as soon as he’d gotten home. He’d eaten his simple, hurried dinner while bathing his ears in Cecil’s dulcet tones, and while he was washing the dishes, he’d thought, _why not?_

There were any number of reasons why not, but he pushed those thoughts out of his mind. All he wanted to focus on now was Cecil, and the thoughts and impulses that the beautiful voice instilled in him. He settled onto his couch and let the voice wash over him, saying the words that Carlos had written.

He had to write the next round of demo audio clips. Al had been late with the requirements this time. Carlos was supposed to get them in by the end of the day, but it had been 4:50 before Al emailed him. Ten minutes wasn’t nearly enough time to put anything together, especially given the amount of time it would take to export the audio, and besides, Al’s requests this time were… a little bit difficult to fulfil.

Carlos had replied to Al asking for clarification, but getting a response from his boss in the last seven minutes of the working day was out of the question. Al had probably turned his computer off right after the email to Carlos had gone out. So Carlos had spent the last few minutes of his day puzzling over Al’s cryptic set of instructions.

For one thing, there was the mention of viral marketing… and Carlos didn’t know whether Al wanted to use the software for viral marketing, or hear it talk about viral marketing, or have Carlos construct a theoretical viral marketing campaign of some sort and make Cecil a part of it. He didn’t know whether, when Al mentioned audible.com elsewhere in the email, it was because he intended to perform viral marketing for audible.com or if that was an entirely separate requirement. Carlos didn’t even know how to do marketing for Audible. Did Night Vale have a contract with Audible, or were they merely trying to get one? Did Audible even know anything about this? If not, what were the legal ramifications? Carlos didn’t want to get in trouble for using another company’s copyrighted slogans or accidentally defaming them in any way, considering that he hadn’t been given any guidelines. He could tone down his usual writing style, but if Al wanted something different than usual, wouldn’t he have asked? But what if Al didn’t realize what he was asking for, and Carlos sent him something more lurid than Al was expecting (though really Al should know better by now), and with the time crunch because of how late Al’s message had gone out, he played the unacceptable audio to the client (or whoever listened to the audio Al received; Carlos still didn’t know) and then the client got upset and Al lost his job because of Carlos’ messed up sense of humor?

The trouble with combining work and masturbation was that it cut both ways. On the one hand, there was the obvious danger of training oneself to interpret work-related stimulus as sexual, which could lead to embarrassing and unprofessional moments.

On the other hand, here was Carlos, trying to relax and enjoy himself, and he couldn’t stop stressing over his stupid job. He backed up the audio, since he hadn’t really been paying attention to what it was saying. It picked up with “-black hair, not to ignore the dignified, if premature, touch of grey at the temples.”

That was more like it. Carlos loved hearing Cecil praise his hair. He would have to make a point of writing more along those lines. As the recording kept going, Carlos remembered the whole haircut story he’d developed as an excuse to make Cecil sound angry.

He’d gotten better at modulating Cecil’s emotions, now. He’d adjusted those settings, made them easier to access and given them labels. Theoretically that made it easier for other people to use the software, but so far no one else had really done anything with it. Carlos wasn’t even sure Al ever opened it; he felt it was pretty likely that instead of trying things on his own, Al just asked Carlos to do them. Well, that was why Carlos was employed at Night Vale, so he could hardly complain.

A part of him missed those old challenges. He wished he could face those challenges again, rather than these new ones that he had no idea what to do with. What else was it Al wanted? There was something about alliteration. Well, that was easy enough. He’d just have to write something like “floating feline.” Hey, he’d already had Cecil talk about a floating cat, hadn’t he? He could just write a simple tie-in. “See? Easy,” he muttered to himself. Not like that “viral marketing” requirement, whatever that was about.

Oh, and apparently the whole “pt words” thing several weeks ago had been a mistake, and Al really wanted “py words.” He’d just forgotten to mention the correction to Carlos until now. Since getting the email, Carlos had thought of precisely one “py” word, and that was “pyramid.” He was certain there were others, but he hadn’t really spent enough time concentrating to figure out what they were. “Pirate”? No. That was a “pi” word, not a “py” word. “Pillow”… was another “pi” word. “Pi” was just a “pi” word. “Py” wasn’t a word at all.

Okay, clearly Carlos was not going to relax while he still had this hanging over his head. He decided to work on writing things out for the demonstration. Checking his email, of course Al hadn’t gotten back to him. Al hadn’t gotten back to him when Carlos had turned off his work computer at 5:01, and the thought that his boss would respond to him outside of work hours was even more ridiculous than the thought that his boss might respond during the last few minutes of the work day. When Al was off work, he was off work.

Normally, Carlos was the same, but he just couldn’t focus on anything else at the moment. He started writing. Proceeding without clarification from Al meant that he might have to rewrite some of what he was doing, or, more likely, expand upon it. That was okay, though. He wouldn’t even be able to plug the text into the software until the next morning, so there would be a delay anyway, and he could use it to make any necessary changes before he committed Cecil’s voice to the things he was writing now. He’d do what seemed right to him based on what he knew now, and then it would be as done as he could get it, and he could forget about it and focus on things that were more enjoyable.

He kept getting frustrated trying to suss out what Al wanted. Looking more closely at the email, Carlos saw that it didn’t say “py words,” just “py word,” singular. So then… was “pyramid” sufficient, or would Al want a _different_ “py” word, or had he _meant_ to ask for multiple “py” words and just left the “s” off by accident?

After about an hour of trying to answer those kinds of questions for himself, Carlos took a Facebook break. He was at home; he was allowed.

Some idiot he’d known in high school was posting about the Flat Earth Society. Not just posting about the existence of the Flat Earth Society, but actually sending out _event invitations_ for the Flat Earth Society. If it were one of Carlos’ work friends, or someone he knew from college, he’d assume it was ironic, but this guy… Carlos had never liked this guy. They hadn’t been friends in high school. They’d hardly even spoken. They were just “friends” on Facebook now because everyone who’d been at that high school at the same time had all friended each other. And now Carlos was reading some crap written by some people who didn’t understand how to read a friggin’ book or do simple mathematical calculations that would confirm the Earth’s curvature based on reported times of day at different locations.

Maybe he would have to institute a no-Facebook policy at home, as well as at work. He shut the Facebook tab and went back to fulfilling Al’s cryptic requirements.

He was working on it past midnight, and he fell asleep to thoughts of pyramids and failed attempts at viral marketing and he didn’t even have the energy to restart the audio, so he fell asleep without Cecil’s voice washing over him.

Trying to get work done at home had been a terrible idea.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For another "py" word that Carlos could have used, see the title of this work.


	10. Feral Dogs

There’d been a school shooting.

_Another_ school shooting.

Carlos had lost count of the number of these incidents he’d heard about over the past few months. He tried not to pay attention when they came on the news. Everything that anyone on TV or the Internet had to say on the matter was at best depressing and at worst infuriating.

As much as Carlos tried to avoid hearing about it, there was only a certain extent to which he could control which media he encountered. There was a TV in the doctor’s waiting room where Carlos was waiting for an appointment he’d made because he was pretty sure he had carpal tunnel syndrome. _What kind of doctor has a TV in their waiting room?_ He wondered.

There was some sort of 2nd-Amendment-Rights rally on the news. A speaker was addressing the audience. He might have been a celebrity in some circles, but Carlos didn’t recognize him. He was shouting and looking directly into the camera and giving instructions to the viewers. “Read your constitution!” Shouted the possibly famous man on the screen, and Carlos felt insulted by this guy issuing him commands. Like Carlos was a child being talked to about a subject he wasn’t trusted to fully understand.

The man’s comments felt so personal, like they were lashing out and dragging Carlos into this debate whether he wanted to take part in it or not. The whole thing was ridiculous and tragic and Carlos hated it.

After holding and manipulating his wrist for a few minutes, the doctor said that he didn’t have carpal tunnel syndrome. He told Carlos to take ibuprofen when his wrists hurt and to get one of those things to put in front of a keyboard to make typing less of a strain. Carlos returned to work with half of the day left and no valid excuse to take time off from his job. The doctor’s visit had eaten into the time he was meant to be working, and it hadn’t resulted in allowance for a short vacation or break or physical therapy like Carlos had been expecting, so now he had to work quickly to catch up.

He tried to get his work done. Really, he did. But even when he settled down and concentrated on the phrases Al wanted him to use this time… things like “feral dogs,” “zoo,” and “SPCA,” all he could think of was that damn television rally and the condescending speaker.

“Read _your_ constitution,” Carlos muttered to himself.

The software was open on his computer, the input text from his previous demonstrations visible as he scrolled around. He stopped at the news story from several weeks ago, the one Al had had Cecil read out word-for-word, about metal detectors in schools. Carlos wondered why nobody had mentioned that in response to the recent shooting. There were shouts and debates from all corners, covering all sorts of obviously connected issues and even more only nebulously connected issues, but nothing about school metal detectors. It seemed obvious to Carlos that they were something to at least _think_ about.

A quick Google News search revealed nothing recent about the metal detectors. They were in a completely different part of the country than the shooting had been, and had been proposed specifically to combat gang violence, whereas the shooting had not been gang related, but still, if the system had been implemented in one circumstance, surely it could be given a try in others.

Carlos was almost disgusted with how quickly he came up with the gun-toters’ probable counterargument: If children were forced to go through metal detectors to prevent them from carrying firearms, then how could they hope to defend themselves the next time a criminal with a gun forced his way into the school?

In an attempt to exorcise the nauseating debate raging through his head, Carlos attempted for the second time in his life to write satire. Once he got going, it came surprisingly easily. Al’s list of requisite phrases even proved to be inspirational, rather than hindering, and he worked them all into a twisted allegory about gun control and fear. He even managed to get “Groucho Marx” in there, though for a while he’d thought it impossible.

When Carlos listened to the completed audio, he found the similarity in tone and content to the real-world news stories quite unsettling. He’d tried to write something completely fantastical, but, militant dogs aside, it sounded entirely too plausible, like he could turn on a local radio and hear almost precisely what he’d written, without a hint of irony. Sometimes, the horror of reality could be tough for fiction to beat.


	11. Wheat & Wheat By-Products

Carlos was on a nostalgia kick.

It had been going strong for over a month, now. First it was just those short stories he’d read in high school… revisiting Jorge Luis Borges, Gabriel Garcia Márquez, a bit of Kafka, and some individual works that were memorable but not the product of quite so prolific minds. The stories reminded him of the conversations they’d had about them in class, and the novels they’d been working on at those times, and soon Carlos was working his way through _The Horned Man_ and _Haroun and the Sea of Stories_. Just the stuff he remembered liking… He wouldn’t read his way through _A Farewell to Arms_ again if someone paid him.

Re-reading short stories brought back some memories, but re-reading novels brought back far more. He remembered reading these books in theaters before movies started, on car rides, in breaks between classes. Sometimes he’d get to a particular page and remember precisely where he was when he read that page the first time.

So then he started watching movies that had come out when he was in high school, or that he’d seen then for the first time. _Metropolis_ was one he’d first seen at a friend’s 16th birthday party, and it was just as laughably out-of-date and prescient and magnificently evocative as it had been when Carlos was a teenager. He started looking up TV shows from that time. He listened to the music that he remembered them playing at school dances. Those were dreadful memories, for a variety of reasons, but somehow the music still held a place in his heart.

But the nostalgia didn’t stop there. Somehow, Carlos started feeling a yearning for things from before he was born, artifacts of an earlier time, that he hadn’t been exposed to as a child or experienced first-hand. That was how he wound up watching old, outdated PSAs and educational films.

His favorite was the one about wheat. Well, no, his _favorite_ was probably the one about the dangers of “accidentally going steady,” but the one about wheat was definitely a close second.

He loved everything about it, from the long, slow shots of wheat fields that belonged in a movie with some old guy narrating about his life while his younger version strolled across the screen, to the repeated use of the phrase “wheat and wheat by-products” which left Carlos wondering what precisely a wheat by-product was, to the exhortation to support local farmers by buying bread from local supermarkets, a pushback to the wild and crazy WonderBread infatuation that had been taking over at the time.

Mostly, Carlos kept thinking about the many people he knew with Celiac Disease, something that would never have occurred to the makers of this old film. He wondered how the people in their happy little wheat-filled world would react if they encountered the problems inherent with some people’s reactions to wheat, and how they would handle transitioning to gluten-free bread if necessary.

While typing up some silliness regarding wheat (and wheat by-products!) for Cecil, Carlos encountered a bug.

For a product that had never been finished or released, the software was surprisingly bug-free. This was only the second major bug Carlos had discovered, the first being the issue with “John Peters (you know, the farmer)”. The new bug involved entering text while the settings were in a particular arrangement. If the settings were changed to that arrangement _after_ the text was entered, the voice sounded fine. But if the text was entered while the settings were already in place, Cecil’s voice came out sounding constricted and staticy.

It was easy enough to work around, but Carlos made a note of it, with the intention of going into the code and fixing it if possible. He sent a sample to Al, wherein Cecil complained about a surreal set of technical difficulties in the odd, constricted manner that was the result of the bug. Carlos also looked into the John Peters issue again. The software still inserted “you know, the farmer” after every instance of that name, and Carlos had no idea why.

Al replied with an exasperated-sounding email about how he wished he could give Carlos a team of at least one or two people to try to fix problems like that in the code, but that the company’s budget was screwed over because of trouble from a certain investor.

Carlos definitely wasn’t supposed to know who Al was talking about, but it was clearly Marcus Vansten. Last year, Marcus had withdrawn funding from one of Night Vale’s major projects, meaning that the people on that team who weren’t laid off (about half) had to be reshuffled to other projects, effectively derailing nearly everything that was in-progress while the entire company was reorganized. Carlos hadn’t even been working on the project that Marcus had defunded, and he was still taken off of the thing he’d been working on. Ever since, he’d just been doing whatever miscellaneous work Al found for him, and he constantly worried that his position would be eliminated because there wasn’t anything that absolutely required the attention of another programmer.

Instead of replying to Al’s email directly, Carlos wrote up some wisecracks about Marcus Vansten to send in with the rest of the audio samples. “When you’re worth as much as Marcus Vansten, you have proved your value to society through hard work and determination, and are no longer required to show anyone any further proof that you care about anything or anybody else, because you obviously do. Look at all your money!”

He knew Al would find it funny, and it was a simple way to express a shared concern and annoyance without directly saying anything that could get either of them in trouble.

And then Carlos found himself in that position he was in every once in a while, where he didn’t have anything else that required his attention at the moment, but he wanted to look like he was being productive, because of that whole fear of his position being eliminated thing. Luckily, his biggest work project coincided neatly with his favorite indulgence. He looked forward to times like these, when he needed to keep working with the software to keep up appearances, but there wasn’t anything particular that he needed the software to do.

These were the times when he could make Cecil talk about him.

Carlos had realized that, if he continued typing his own name into Cecil’s interface, he would eventually reach a point where he never wanted to do anything else. So he’d come up with a system. When he was working on something for Al, or any other important task, if any ever came up, then his own name was off-limits. When he was finished with everything important, and _only_ when he was finished with _everything_ important, he could have Cecil talk about him all he wanted.

He’d been looking forward to this all day. Since he’d gotten dressed that morning, actually, if he was being honest with himself. He’d gone clothes shopping the previous day, and ever since looking at himself in the mirror, all he could think of was Cecil complimenting his new shirt, which he thought looked quite good on him. Carlos very rarely thought that clothes looked good on him.

While he wrote about his fictional scientist persona, he started thinking that maybe Carlos the scientist should be heading towards something specific in the city of Night Vale. He wanted a story arc, complete with some manner of climax. He started wondering if anything he’d already written about could be stretched into a more complete story, and all at once it hit him.

The city beneath the bowling alley, which he’d already established and even followed up on, perhaps needed a scientist to investigate it. And perhaps the citizens of Night Vale were all wrong about its nature, and they would need brave, handsome Carlos to solve the problem for them. Maybe some day in the future, Carlos would write about himself climbing into the underground city and revealing the mistake that everyone had been making.

Maybe that mistake was in thinking that the city was of a regular size, when actually it was extremely tiny.

Carlos smiled as he wrote some ominous and vague stuff about the bowling alley. He didn’t want to write himself into that story yet. He thought it would be better to let it build.

After all, he didn’t want to put his fictional counterpart in harm’s way _yet_.


	12. The Candidate

“Goodnight, Carlos. Goodnight.”

Carlos didn’t make Cecil say that. He wanted to, but he couldn’t bring himself to do it.

“Listeners,” sure. No one else was listening, but that was beside the point. “Night Vale,” even, was acceptable, as if Cecil was speaking to the entire company. It felt more reasonable to have Cecil address a group of which Carlos happened to be a part than to address Carlos directly.

He got so far, once, as typing “Goodnight, Carlos” into the software interface, right at five o’clock when he should have been getting ready to leave. It would be nice, he thought, to have Cecil wish him goodnight just before he went home for the day. But before he finished typing out the phrase, he lost his nerve and deleted it.

It just seemed too _personal_ , Carlos reflected to himself after work, strolling through the mall and trying to get a head start on Christmas shopping. All the stuff where Cecil called him “perfect” and “beautiful” was so over-the-top as to enter the realm of self-parody, and Carlos was comfortable with that. But Cecil wishing him goodnight… there was no way to make that be anything but sincere.

There was a huge crowd in the mall, blocking the way to the food court, so thick and chaotic that Carlos, who hadn’t been paying close attention to where he was going, found himself somewhat turned around. He chose a direction and started to push his way through all the people, most of whom somehow didn’t seem to be trying to get anywhere.

Evidently he’d chosen the wrong direction, because he wound up at a barrier with a mess of people behind him. On the other side of the barrier was the usual set-up for Santa… a chair, some snow made out of fluffy white fabric, a camera and a photo printer. Missing from the picture was Santa himself, having evidently been replaced by an apologetic mall employee, who was explaining to angry mothers and fathers and sad-faced children that he didn’t know _when_ Santa would be there, and he couldn’t be certain that Santa would show up before the mall closed. Carlos attempted to shuffle his way around the Santa pavilion and out of the crowd, but it was slow going, as the tide movement was towards the place he wanted to get away from.

There was _some_ motion of the crowd, as disappointed families somehow peeled away from the mall employee’s handwringing and a new group moved forward to where they could actually hear him. Carlos heard the man give the same speech three times before he was out of earshot. One mother declared that she’d been waiting with her son for over two hours, trusting that Santa would arrive at any moment.

When Carlos heard that, he couldn’t help but laugh, earning confused (and even suspicious) looks from the parents surrounding him. He understood how his reaction could come off as insensitive, but _really_. He had a hard time imagining being motivated to wait in line for two hours to see Santa even if he was definitely there. That woman was so dedicated to this artifact of consumer culture that she’d wait just for the _promise_ of seeing him. A promise that, as had just clearly been demonstrated, was easily broken.

He almost thought that these people’s disappointment, the abuse suffered by the mall employee, and the inconvenience to shoppers such as Carlos himself, was all worth it, just for the symbolism. _Waiting for Godot_ rewritten for a modern era. He doubted very much that the mall had deliberately arranged for an absent Santa as a sort of performance art piece, because that kind of thing probably didn’t put families in the mood to spend loads of money, but he kind of wished they had.

At work the next morning, Carlos decided that he should try to break away from Cecil admiring him. He suspected that he’d been taking that tendency a little too far.

The obvious remedy was to have Cecil admire someone else. Not another man, though. At least, not as a romantic prospect. Even though Cecil was just a voice on his computer, Carlos felt a stirring of jealousy when he imagined that voice expressing infatuation with anyone but himself.

Maybe a politician. Cecil could be swept up in a movement, throw his support behind a campaign for a charismatic leader. A charismatic leader who wasn’t described as beautiful or having perfect hair, because those were _Carlos’_ qualities and he wouldn’t have Cecil using those words in regards to anyone else.

Which posed a problem, because politicians tend to have good-looking, or at least well-tended, hair. It’s part of what their publicity teams do.

Carlos supposed he could make the politician bald, but that stretched his suspension of disbelief. It was ridiculous, of course, that a charismatic bald politician just didn’t sound plausible compared to a five-headed dragon under suspicion of insurance fraud…

Carlos had nearly forgotten about Hiram McDaniels. He’d been a throwaway joke from some of Carlos’ earliest experimentations with the software. Maybe, Carlos thought, Hiram would have an interest in politics. He was already a fraud, which put him one step away from being a politician… and maybe he was very charming, and he _definitely_ wouldn’t have any hair for Cecil to admire.

It was settled. Carlos was going to wean himself off of Cecil’s obsession with him by giving Cecil an obsession with a five-headed dragon’s political career.

He was part way through writing fawning dialog about Hiram when Al emailed him. Most of the email content was ordinary, a few words and phrases to hear Cecil say, and some generic encouragements to give the software more “emotional depth,” whatever that meant. But one line in particular stood out to Carlos.

“Does it ever sound sinister to you when it says ‘goodnight’?” Al had written.

“Huh,” Carlos said. He didn’t remember sending Al any audio of Cecil saying “goodnight,” but then, it was something Cecil said very often, and Carlos sent Al so many little snippets, that it was possible he’d sent some along and just forgotten it. _Or_ , maybe this was evidence that Al actually was messing with the software on his own, occasionally?

Maybe Cecil had, at some point, said “Goodnight, Al. Goodnight.” Carlos didn’t like the jealous pang that went through him when he considered that possibility.

His immediate reaction to the query was, _No. Of course not. Cecil never sounds sinister. He sounds comforting and friendly and like a benevolent force looking out for my best interests._

But he refrained from typing up those initial thoughts and sending them to Al without giving fair consideration to the question. So he pulled up all the audio snippets of Cecil saying “Goodnight,” and listened to them while trying to keep an open mind.

After listening to five or so, Carlos thought he understood what Al meant. He supposed Cecil could sound a little sinister, from time to time. He tweaked some settings, though he wasn’t sure if that made Cecil sound less sinister or even _more_ sinister. After all, Carlos suspected that what Al considered sinister might be the precise quality that Carlos considered sexy. Vocal aspects were subjective like that.

He wrote lines to incorporate Al’s requests, which this time included “cans,” “windmill farms,” “flash floods,” and “oxygen.” Every once in a while he’d take a break to continue the saga of Hiram McDaniels’ bid for mayoral candidacy.

By the time he was done for the day, he longed to make Cecil praise him, like he’d gotten into the habit of doing whenever he had some free time. But he was determined to break that habit. No sweet-talk directed at Carlos would come from Cecil that day.

Of course, he could still have Cecil talk sweetly to him _indirectly_. All he had to do was use the same trick as when Cecil said goodnight. He didn’t have to talk to Carlos; he could just talk to his _listeners_. Or, even better, Carlos could make it singular. _Listener._ Carlos would know it was him, but there would be no direct reference to him.

“Now, it is dark. It is quiet. Just you and me, dear listener.”

Oh, yes. Carlos contentedly exported the audio, a couple of paragraphs’ worth of Cecil speaking to him as an individual without actually naming him, which fell into Carlos’ parameters of acceptability, but just barely.

He would definitely listen to that when it was time to go to sleep. Maybe he couldn’t bring himself to have Cecil wish him goodnight, but he’d thought of the next best thing.


	13. A Story About You

_Carlos,_

_Most of the dialog we’ve given the software so far has been third-person narration. There’ve been occasional first- and second-person bits in the mix, but not a lot. I’d really like to see if we can sell this as a conversational partner, of sorts… something that could address the user, you know?_

_So, could you focus on second-person speech in the next batch of samples?_

_Thanks,_

_Al_

For a moment, Carlos considered the possibility of sending Al the audio from Cecil talking directly to the listener that he’d generated a couple of weeks earlier. He decided against it; that was something he’d rather keep private, reserved for his ears only, regardless of how much he could impress Al with a quick turnaround before sending him a more complete selection of audio samples.

No, when he sent second-person samples to Al, the person being addressed by Cecil would have to be someone other than Carlos. Someone who was _definitively_ not Carlos. He didn’t think he’d be able to focus otherwise. Cecil talking to him on occasion was a diverting treat. Cecil talking to him through his entire work day would be an unbearable source of distraction. It could even result in the opposite sort of problem to the one he’d had that ill-fated evening at home, the one where he’d wound up working for most of the night.

In order to avoid such a fiasco, Carlos would have to make the subject being addressed into a unique person, separate from himself. He would have to provide details.

“You live in a trailer, out near the car lot, next to Old Woman Josie’s house,” Carlos began writing, without any sort of plan, just wanting to get specific as quickly as possible. He addressed a fictional person, someone he didn’t have a name for, but who presumably fit into the whole fictional community on which Cecil reported. He told this person about their own history. (For all his effort to include specificity in this story he was making up on the spot, he didn’t actually have a clear picture of the person being addressed, even their gender.) He told this person about other Night Vale residents who crossed their path during the course of events, mentioned certain Night Vale landmarks along the way.

It occurred to Carlos that he could hint to this one Night Vale resident about what was going on at the bowling alley. Not that they would understand, of course, being too wrapped up in their own story. “This is a story about you,” Cecil said, multiple times, ensuring that the subject would be overwhelmed with their own egomania and unconcerned with the other, bigger stories happening around them.

Carlos delivered the first hint about the bowling alley in Russian. It was a decent means of obfuscating the point, and besides, Al was eager to get the software working in a variety of languages. Carlos could do little bits of other languages here and there, but multi-language support was the sort of thing that required a full team, and it looked like Carlos wouldn’t be getting one anytime soon.

As Carlos had explained to Al in an email:

_I’ve plugged in words from various languages, and they sound fine to me, but I can’t tell how it would seem to a native speaker of that language. There aren’t any languages besides English that I’m fluent in (unless you start counting programming languages but that’s just silly) so I can’t even make a decent judgement about a single language._

_I mean, I don’t even speak enough Spanish to get through a short conversation with my distant cousins at Christmas get-togethers. If you really want to make this software usable for anyone other than English-speakers, it’s gonna be a job for a full localization team._

Al had, mostly, dropped the subject, though he still hinted now and then that it would be nice to expand the language base. Carlos decided on Russian for his bowling alley hint (he’d already made the Apache Tracker speak Russian, just on a whim, because it seemed suitably incongruous) and spent the next couple of hours importing the Cyrillic alphabet and its phonemes into the software’s database. He tweaked the settings until Cecil was pronouncing a few phrases in such a way that Carlos was unable to identify anything wrong with Cecil’s pronunciation compared to an audio guide he’d found.

It probably wasn’t the best use of his time, spending a total of over three hours on what amounted to less than a minute of audio, but Carlos justified it by thinking that this was the time he _would_ have been spending on praise or private messages from Cecil to himself. Wasting time on a semi-useless project was the perfect way to avoid wasting time on his inappropriate attraction to a confluence of programming.

He put in another bit about the bowling alley, this one far less subtle. No clues about what was actually going on there, just a clue that it was important. Carlos was getting caught up in this little world he’d been crafting. Fleshing out the inner workings of the city of Night Vale was starting to feel just as compelling as hearing Cecil’s sweet voice speak fondly of Carlos.

He tried to get Cecil to sound conversational, but mostly the voice sounded as if it was narrating to someone, rather than conversing with them. The closest Carlos could get Cecil to sounding like he was just talking casually to someone was still noticeably stilted. It could sound like Cecil was reciting conversations that other people had had, but it just didn’t sound like Cecil was currently having a conversation. Maybe he would get there with some more tweaking, but Carlos had wasted enough time trying to get the Russian to sound right and he didn’t want to delay getting back to Al while he messed with the settings some more trying to get a more authentic conversational sound.

Hopefully Al would be impressed enough with the Russian that he wouldn’t mind.

Carlos did mess around somewhat, and the settings were in an unusual configuration when he wrote his customary “Goodnight, Night Vale, goodnight.” With that configuration, Cecil sounded indisputably sinister. Remembering what Al had said a couple of weeks ago, Carlos exported that audio, and the audio of Cecil saying “goodnight” with a far less sinister air, to include both clips in the attachments he sent to Al.

_Hi Al,_

_I’m afraid he’s not very good with conversations. That could be something that I can fix over time with some minor alterations here and there, or I might need to get some more people and overhaul the software more thoroughly. I’m still not sure how far I’m capable of pushing him on my own._

_I did do some work on getting him functional for other languages. He can speak Russian now, sort of. I mean, it sounds all right to me, but I don’t actually speak Russian so I don’t really know what I’m talking about._

_I also discovered, pretty much accidentally, a setting that made “goodnight” sound sinister, like you mentioned a while back. The settings are in the notes on that file. I’m interested to know if those are the same settings you were on when you thought he sounded sinister before. If you don’t remember, that’s okay. It would just be a useful data point to have._

_I’m assuming that you actually entered the word “goodnight” and that’s what you heard… If I actually sent you some audio and that’s what you thought sounded sinister and I forgot about it, then ignore this request and I’m sorry._

_Carlos_

Carlos nearly hit “Send” before he realized that he’d referred to Cecil as “he” in the email. He hastily changed all those pronouns to “it.” If Al had noticed, that would have been embarrassing.


	14. The Man in the Tan Jacket

2013 opened with Marcus Vansten in the news.

That wasn’t terribly surprising. The guy was a crook, albeit the kind who did most of his swindling legally. He wound up in the news every once in a while, only to fade out of the public consciousness again as soon as there was a scandal involving someone more famous or interesting.

The unexpected part was that _Cecil_ was in the news. The clip Carlos had exported of Cecil satirizing Marcus Vansten was all over the Internet, and all over the newscasters’ descriptions of Vansten’s latest troubles.

The worst part about all of that was that Vansten had heard the clip. Carlos cursed the news stations for playing it… he couldn’t be certain that it would have escaped Vansten’s notice otherwise, but with it playing on television constantly, there was no way Vansten could miss it.

No one seemed to know that Carlos was involved with the clip, thankfully. No one outside of the company knew that Night Vale was even _working_ on a voice synthesizer. Very few people _in_ the company knew, either. Most people were under the impression that the clip was a recording of a Night Vale employee speaking.

Of course, without a specific target, Vansten just got to be pissed off at the whole company. He sent an email decrying the lack of professionalism and respect that clearly ran rampant in Night Vale’s organising structure, and insisted that there would be dire consequences.

The email was distributed to executives and managers, who were instructed not to pass it on to anyone else. Al, though, thought that Carlos deserved to see it, and to have an idea of what was going on.

_Luckily, it looks like no one’s going to get fired over this. Marcus withdrew money from a project a while back, but we’ve currently got a contract with him that even he can’t afford to break. He’s making a stink because it’s all he can do; these are all idle threats._

_Obviously, whoever made that recording must be held responsible. If you know anything, tell someone. We must take this infraction seriously._

_Al_

_PS I think it would be a good idea to avoid mentioning too many names or describing people too particularly when you work with that software you’re developing, for at least a little while._

Carlos huffed at the gently chiding tone of the email. He suspected that Al had sent the audio clip to others, which would be how it had gotten out in the first place. It seemed a little hypocritical, then, even with a wink and a nudge, to turn around and warn Carlos about the trouble he was barely avoiding.

Al wanted him to avoid describing anyone too specifically, did he? Then, Carlos would oblige by being infuriatingly vague. He wrote of a man whose only distinguishing features were his clothes and accoutrements. “Ladies and gentlemen, surely you have noticed: There’s a man in a tan jacket. Countless residents have seen him, but no one can seem to remember exactly what he looks like, just that he has a tan jacket and a deerskin suitcase, and he has been spotted all over town.”

Carlos rubbed his eyes. Al’s advice was ridiculous. Practically none of the people he’d written about were real. One of the few times he’d mentioned an actual name it had leaked out to the world at large, but that didn’t mean he was going to start seeing news reports about offended old women named Josie who took their beliefs in angels extremely seriously.

A defiant impulse overtook him, and Carlos wrote of a very specific Night Vale resident. Frances Donaldson, the manager of an antiques mall, who was tall and had green eyes. Cecil was describing her more fully than he ever had Marcus Vansten. Why, that clip could have been about _any_ billionaire named Marcus Vansten. But Frances Donaldson, _she_ was a specific person.

It was Carlos’ own private rebellion, mentioning specific, albeit fictitious, names and locations in between generic descriptions of the unmemorable man in the tan jacket. He’d simply send Al the generic bits. That was a joke that might come off as grating in the present atmosphere, but Carlos didn’t really mind being grating just then, when Al had sent that supercilious email. The more specific parts would not make it to Al; they were just a way for Carlos to let off steam.

While Carlos was alternating between mockingly vague and defiantly specific descriptions, he got an email from Al regarding his _actual_ requests for the next round of experiments with the software. “I’d like to see if you can give the voice a breathless, awe-struck quality,” Al wrote, and also, “I’m curious to see if it can duplicate other vocal sounds besides speech, like gulping.”

When Carlos thought of Cecil speaking breathlessly to him, the things he imagined being said were things that he certainly couldn’t get away with typing into a work computer, let alone send to his boss. He decided to set that request aside for the moment.

Getting Cecil to make a gulping sound was surprisingly easy. The phonemes involved were unusual, but Carlos managed to approximate them well enough. It was an exaggerated gulp, to be sure, but for all Carlos knew, Al was _looking_ for an exaggerated gulp rather than something more natural-sounding. Carlos would send in what he had and see if Al wanted him to make any adjustments.

In a way, Carlos reflected, while he listened to what he had so far, his non-descriptions of the man in the tan jacket were more evocative than the mention of Marcus Vansten had been.

The way Al had advised against any specific names or descriptions, it was as if to suggest that the mention of Marcus Vansten had been an accident… that Carlos was merely testing names and phrases, writing sentences that had no meaning on their own. As if Carlos had just _accidentally_ made fun of one of the most powerful and ignominious men in the country.

Maybe Carlos could just write a disclaimer, explaining that everything Cecil said was a work of fiction and any resemblance to real people was coincidental.

Then again, the idea that anyone would actually infer anything from these audio clips was as fictional as the clips themselves. Although, once Carlos started thinking about it, he realized that if someone _did_ listen to his complete audio samples, they might start making all sorts of inferences about their author, some of them correct, many not at all correct. For instance, his animosity for Steve Carlsberg was there on the surface… but then, so was an obsession with the existence or nonexistence of angels, and a fear of bowling alleys.

Someone trying to reconstruct Carlos’ personality from nothing more than that audio would likely arrive at a completely warped conclusion. He thought for a few minutes about the kind of person he seemed to be from the limited information provided there. Of course, given a small amount of information and being told to extrapolate, people would come up with wildly inaccurate theories about _anything_. The fictional people in Carlos’ little story certainly didn’t suspect the truth about the city beneath the bowling alley, after all.

Carlos whiled away the next several minutes coming up with things that the inhabitants of Night Vale _would_ think about the attacking force from underneath the bowling alley, and having Cecil report them as if such speculation was to be taken seriously. Obviously the god of the underground civilization would be named Huntokhar, just as obviously as their ruler was a child-king. It was tremendous fun, coming up with entirely baseless inferences, going into a level of specificity that was absurd enough on its own, even without the added absurdity of the specific things being inferred. It almost seemed too easy for Cecil to surmise that the attackers were “probably bloodthirsty giants” when the truth was entirely the opposite, but Carlos would have felt like he wasn’t doing his job right if he _hadn’t_ made Cecil suggest that.

For a little while, as Carlos wrote about the underground city and made up spurious facts regarding it, he forgot about the whole business with Marcus Vansten and his annoyance with Al and the quest to keep these newest audio samples free of any controversial material. It didn’t last, though. Carlos couldn’t help but speculate on how the bit about Vansten had gotten out. He wondered how many people Al had played it for, and which of them had spread it further, and how many people were in the chain before it left the company and was heard by ears whose owner did not work for Night Vale.

“It seems somebody talked,” said Cecil, giving voice to Carlos’ expression of irritation.

He wanted to vent about it, to experience the catharsis that would come if Cecil decried Al’s indiscretion. But, even just for a moment, even just in a brief sentence that would never be heard by anyone else, Carlos would not defame his boss on his work computer. He wasn’t that angry. Especially when that boss was Al, with whom Carlos usually got along really well, and who was just being infuriating right now because of one stupid mistake.

So Carlos vented his anger at the one target that was always acceptable.

“Was it Steve Carlsberg? Did Steve Carlsberg talk? Maybe some _good_ citizens should go have a chat with Steve and find out what he’s been saying, and to whom.”

Knowing that a piece of audio had got loose like that left Carlos feeling unremittingly paranoid. The more time he spent writing, the more he was convinced that all of it would be audible to the whole world… though he comforted himself with the knowledge that it was unlikely anything he wrote would be of much interest to the world, as long as he kept away from real-world figures like Marcus Vansten. Steve didn’t count, since nobody besides Carlos had any reason to form an opinion about that jerk.

“We’re all being monitored almost 24-7,” Carlos wrote, and Cecil said. Carlos shivered, not out of the misplaced sense of attraction he felt so often when listening to Cecil, but because he could almost feel eyes on him at that moment.

He didn’t let himself linger on that feeling. Those paranoid tendencies were something that cropped up in him every once in a while… something that could likely be inferred about him with reasonable accuracy from the audio he’d generated. But he handled it okay most of the time, because most of the time his comments and jokes never made it past a small circle of friends and acquaintances. Hearing something he’d written broadcast on television, seeing people he barely knew post it on Facebook when they clearly had _no idea_ that Carlos was the originator… it left him feeling vulnerable. But he couldn’t let that feeling rule him. He had work to do.

There were plenty of things, Carlos knew, that a person could speak about breathlessly, in an awe-stricken tone, that were completely safe for work. He was certain of it. But it took him long enough to think of one that as soon as it came to him, he ran with it and didn’t bother trying to think of any others. Cecil, Carlos decided, had just spoken to an angel.

And it was easy. The software was versatile, and as Carlos had become more familiar with its capabilities and made adjustments to the interface, getting Cecil to mimic all sorts of emotional states had become reasonably quick work. There was always a period of adjustment and experimentation when trying out a new one, but Carlos had enough of a feel for the software that it usually didn’t take him too long.

Carlos kept writing about the man in the tan jacket, who, he’d determined, would feature in as many of the clips he sent to Al that day as possible. He had an idea that this man came from near the underground city, but not precisely the same place. The man in the tan jacket wasn’t precisely the same thing. After all, his height was unremarkable, or at least unmemorable, whereas the citizens of the miniature city were tiny.

The angel, as far as Carlos had determined, would have told Cecil in the vaguest of terms where the man in the tan jacket had come from. Underground, which was clear, but could refer to any underground location. And “a flower in the desert” also seemed clear enough, but sounded vague when put next to Cecil’s careful habit of calling it the “Desert Flower Bowling Alley and Arcade Fun Complex.” Thinking about it, Carlos realized that he was probably using ctrl+v too much, because when he typed things out it was more clear how stilted they would sound if they were pronounced in their entirety every time without abbreviation.

There was more that Carlos wanted to write, combining the angel’s hints about the man in the tan jacket with what Cecil already knew, or thought he knew, about the underground city, but it was nearly five, and he wanted to at least get some of his samples to Al before going home for the day.

The note he sent with the audio samples read, “Here’s hoping these are all imprecise enough to stay out of any high-profile news stories. ;)”

Carlos never did wind up going back and having Cecil draw erroneous connections between the man in the tan jacket and the underground city. Coming back to work the next morning, it didn’t seem very important. He moved on to other things, like the transformation of a pizza place into a speakeasy after the criminalization of wheat. That was a much more gratifying subject to write about.


	15. Street Cleaning Day

Carlos _knew_ not to park on the street on Mondays. Monday was Street Cleaning Day. Had been for longer than Carlos had been working at Night Vale. After the odd mishap when Carlos first started, getting a few tickets his first year there, winding up late to work on a few other occasions because he was driving around trying to find an open spot that wasn’t affected by street cleaning, he’d eventually found a system that worked.

Every morning, Carlos parked in roughly the same spot. Sometimes his habitual spot was taken, but there was almost always a spot nearby. It was a bit of a walk from that section of parking lot to the building entrance, but Carlos reasoned that he could do with the exercise, and it was worth it to always be able to park in the morning without any fuss.

On this particular Monday, though, the lot had been unusually crowded. There were no spots open in the area where Carlos usually parked, which was bad enough, but after driving up and down a few lanes, Carlos became convinced that there were no spots at all in the entire parking lot.

By the time he got out of the lot and found an open spot on the street, he was worried about being late. He locked the car as quickly as he could and rushed into the building.

The whole matter slipped out of his head when he started working. He was trying to get Cecil to emulate different sorts of tonalities for the sake of quoting dialogue, something he’d had mixed results with in the past. Remembering where he’d parked just stopped being a priority, and when he got out of work, he headed to his usual spot, and was confused as to why his car wasn’t there. He walked back and forth, verifying that it wasn’t just hidden behind a larger car, and it was definitely gone. There were a handful of empty spaces, any one of which _might_ have been where Carlos parked that morning. He was in the process of pulling out his phone to call the police and report a stolen vehicle when he remembered parking on the street.

Whatever gathering that had filled the parking lot earlier seemed to be over, and there were plenty of open spots facing Carlos as he ran to the area where he hoped he correctly remembered leaving his car. 

He saw his car, and slowed to a walk, calmer now that he’d found it. Then he saw the sign in front of the car, stopped, and put a hand to his head.

He’d seen the sign that morning, of course, but he hadn’t paid attention to it. There’d been no need to. He already knew exactly what it said.

NO PARKING  
MONDAYS  
11 AM - 1 PM  
STREET CLEANING

Leaving the car in the morning, his mind had been entirely occupied with getting to work on time, so there hadn’t been any room left for thoughts about signs and whether or not they were relevant to him. Now, though, he was free to think through the implications of that sign, and the fact that he had been avoiding parking on the street at all, but especially on Mondays, for years now, precisely because of that sign and others like it.

Sure enough, there was an envelope tucked under the windshield wiper of his car. None of the other cars on the street seemed to have tickets, but then, their drivers had probably all been smart enough not to park there until after one.

He crumpled the envelope in his fist as he unlocked his car, partly from carelessness as he shuffled keys and ticket and messenger bag from hand to hand, partly as an expression of frustration. When he got into the car he opened the envelope, expecting to see a ticket for $62, but, to his surprise, the fine for getting in the way of Street Cleaning Day had increased since the last time he’d made that mistake. He was left staring at an $85 ticket.

He just wished someone had _warned_ him. Sure, there was the sign, but that had clearly done no good. If Carlos was going to avoid ever parking in the wrong spot on Street Cleaning Day, he needed some sort of repeated reminder, something to keep Street Cleaning Day fresh in his mind, something sensational that not only kept him thinking about Street Cleaning Day but that instilled in him a deep-seated aversion to it. Street Cleaning Day, Carlos needed to remember, would come upon him and destroy everything if he let down his vigilance for even a moment.

It took a few minutes of sitting in the car staring at the ticket, and then pushing his hands into his eyes trying to make it all go away, before Carlos was ready to drive home. Street Cleaning Day was the most. Horrible. Thing. Ever.


	16. The Phone Call

Al was waiting in Carlos’ cubicle when he arrived at work.

Carlos couldn’t think why Al would be looking for him first thing in the morning. He could count on one hand the number of times they’d seen each other in person so far that year.

“Did you want to talk to me about something?” Asked Carlos. Al, who had been preoccupied with his phone, jumped at the unexpected sound.

“Carlos! There you are. Are you all right? I just sent you a text. I was worried.”

Sure enough, Carlos’ phone buzzed. When Carlos checked, it displayed a text reading, “Where are you?” The text was time-stamped 8:01.

“I sent you an email, and the system said you hadn’t read it yet, and I thought that was strange because you usually read emails so quickly, so after half an hour or so I decided to come down, make sure nothing was wrong, and you weren’t here at all. Normally you’re so punctual, so it made me think maybe something terrible had happened and you were unable to contact anyone… You were on a plane yesterday, right? And what if it had crashed, even though I hadn’t heard anything on the news, I still thought, what if you were dead, and none of us knew… I’m so glad you’re safe. It’s such a relief to see you here.”

Carlos looked at Al, confused. “You did all that, during the first minute of the working day?”

“No,” said Al, sounding equally confused. “I _did_ do all that during the first hour of the working day… which I guess is pretty quickly, granted, but once I got the idea into my head that you’d died in a plane crash I didn’t want to waste time sitting around waiting for word to reach me.”

The time display on Carlos’ phone now read 8:03. “I don’t understand,” Carlos said, “The day just started.”

“Are you feeling all right?” Asked Al, the confusion in his voice replaced with concern. “Do you need to take a sick day?”

“No, I’m fine. I just need to get to work.” Carlos walked to his desk and moved the mouse, waking the computer.

“Are you sure? If you slept late, that may be indicative of a larger problem. Sleeping unusually long was the first symptom when I had kidney stones…”

“I’m pretty sure I don’t have kidney stones,” said Carlos, opening the company’s email client. There was an email from Al, timestamped 8:11, which was odd, since as far as Carlos was aware, that time was still a few minutes in the future. He checked the time on the start bar to be certain, and actually screamed when he saw that it said 9:04.

Al put a hand on his shoulder, saying, “Maybe you should lie down,” but Carlos wasn’t paying attention. He pulled out his phone again, checking that time against the computer’s time, and found that the computer was precisely one hour ahead.

Carlos stepped out of the cubicle, incidentally dislodging Al’s hand in the process, to look at the hallway clock. It agreed with his computer. By now he had an audience, his scream from earlier having attracted attention. His neighbors in the programming department were all poking their heads over cubicle walls or around doors, watching as he looked back and forth between the clock and his phone.

“It’s… but… the clock… time is… it’s not working!”

“Carlos,” said Al, putting a hand on his shoulder again, this time to lead him down the hall, “You do need to lie down.” Carlos was too frightened and confused to do anything but go with him.

Al brought him to the break room and made him sit on the couch. “It’s okay if you need to go home,” Al said, “But I don’t want you driving until you’re calmer. Take a nap if you need to, or just sit there, whatever you want. Just don’t get off that couch until I know you’re better, okay?”

Carlos just nodded, staring despondently at his phone, trying to wrap his head around what was going on. He didn’t hear Al leave, first noticing that he was alone when he looked up to check the break room clock. It, too, was an hour ahead. He groaned and leaned to the side, resting his head on a couch cushion. He couldn’t properly lie down on the couch; he was wearing shoes, and he could hardly take his shoes off while he was at work.

He just didn’t understand how every clock in the building had jumped an hour ahead. Especially since Al hadn’t seemed to notice. So something had affected Al’s clocks at home, presumably, and Al’s phone, and the clocks in Night Vale’s headquarters, but not Carlos’ phone. And… perhaps it had affected other employees, as well? No one else seemed to be panicking, but then, Carlos hadn’t really gotten a chance to talk to any of them. He needed some sort of verification, so he sent a text to Julie in accounting.

_Carlos: What time is it?_

About a minute later (and Carlos knew this because he was watching the clocks very closely) she replied.

_Julie: Doesn’t your phone have a clock in it?_

_Carlos: Just answer the question please._

_Julie: Nine sixteen._

_Julie: Why?_

_Carlos: THAT DOESN’T MAKE ANY SENSE._

It looked like everyone at Night Vale, except for Carlos, had been shunted an hour into the future. “It must have happened on Friday,” he muttered to himself. He’d missed work on Friday to spend the weekend at a conference. Or perhaps, he realized, the conference may have somehow inoculated him from the time shift.

Another text came in.

_Julie: Are you all right?_

_Carlos: I think so. Don’t worry about it._

There was no point getting anyone else worked up. He’d made enough of a scene with that shriek in his cubicle earlier. If something was wrong with everyone except him, then he’d have to find some way to liberate his colleagues without alerting them to the problem. Possibly it was already too late. Al and Julie and possibly everyone who had seen Carlos’ little meltdown would be looking out for him. Possibly this went all the way to the top. Carlos would have to sneak into the records office and see if there was any evidence of the shift, or any gaps in the recent record that could indicate a cover-up. Digital records were too easily altered to be of use in that kind of search.

Carlos went embarrassingly far down that train of thought, picturing himself as the lone dissident fighting off a malevolent force that had taken over his company, before he considered the possibility that, instead of everyone else being an hour _ahead_ , he might just be an hour _behind_. Occam’s razor determined that, rather than something affecting every clock except for Carlos’, it was more likely something had affected Carlos’ clock and none of the others.

The most reasonable thing to do would be to set his phone to match the other clocks, get back to work, and pretend that he hadn’t melted down over a stupid technology malfunction. But Carlos’ phone, unfortunately, did not allow the user to set the time. Frustrated, Carlos pulled the back off of the phone and removed the battery, looking at the exposed circuits and wondering if he could rewire them. Even if he had the equipment, he didn’t have the expertise to perform that sort of programming, so after a minute of irritated examination, he put his phone back together and turned it on.

8:34, his phone said as it turned on, before displaying a message that read “Updating Time” and changing to 9:34. Carlos put a hand to his face. Of course. His phone only checked the time when it turned on. Since he hadn’t restarted his phone when he got back from the conference, he hadn’t thought to adjust to the change in time zones. His phone was the only timepiece he ever used.

The whole mess was just an embarrassing mistake on Carlos’ part, and the best he could do was get to work without making another scene or bothering anyone.

_Carlos: I figured out why I was late/freaked out this morning. Can I go back to my desk now?_

_Al: If you’re sure you’re okay._

_Carlos: I’m sure._

Nobody paid attention when he returned to his cubicle, for which Carlos was grateful. He sat down at his desk, woke his computer, and finally read that email from Al.

_I installed your updated version of the speech synthesis software. It looks great, for the most part, but I noticed that the controls to change the speaking voice are harder to access now. We really haven’t done any work with that aspect of the software; I’ve basically had you trying to hone it using just one voice setting, but it occurs to me that maybe we shouldn’t be neglecting that capability. Changing the voice is bound to be one of the major selling points, especially if it could be used to emulate particular speakers. Trying to match a particular voice would be challenging, but I bet there are lots of people who would love to have something with that capability._

Carlos hadn’t changed the sound of the voice because he didn’t _want_ to change the sound of the voice. He loved listening to Cecil, and as long as his job allowed him to do that, he was happy. But Al wanted him to try to emulate a particular voice, so that’s what he would do. So what if it subverted the changes he’d intentionally made to prevent him from accidentally switching away from Cecil’s dulcet timbre. He could focus on his imaginary boyfriend on his own time.

\---

“So what was all that about this morning?” Julie asked him when they met for lunch.

Carlos sighed. The other programmers, thankfully, had said nothing to him about the incident that morning, and he’d hoped he wouldn’t have to deal with any actual fallout. “My phone was wrong,” he grumbled.

“And… how, exactly, was your phone wrong?”

“You know how I missed Friday because of that conference?”

“Oh yeah,” said Julie, “How was that?”

“Awful,” said Carlos. “The panels were all out of date, nobody knew what they were talking about, and I hardly slept at all… I even fell asleep early last night, to make up for it…” Carlos trailed off as he realized that he probably had fallen asleep close to his typical time, but had been mislead by his inaccurate phone. “...Or maybe I didn’t, because the thing is, I was in a different time zone, and when I flew out there my phone was off, and when I turned it on again it adjusted to the new time, but then I forgot to turn it off for the return flight-”

“Oh my god! Isn’t that dangerous?” Julie interrupted.

Carlos’ hand waggled in a so-so gesture. “Less so than they would have you believe. A whole lot of cell phones could momentarily interrupt the pilot’s instruments, but only for a fraction of a second, and there’s only a small chance of it happening even if everyone on board is actively making a phone call. People forget to turn their phones off all the time, and I don’t think a plane’s ever crashed because of it. But the _point_ is, because I didn’t have to turn my phone on again, it didn’t check the time, and I was an hour behind today.”

“You seemed really worked up about it.”

“Yeah,” Carlos admitted, “I guess I overreacted.”

“At least you got it figured out, though.”

Carlos shrugged in response.

“Hey,” said Julie, “You should be a panel leader. Then there’d at least be somebody at one of those conferences worth listening to.”

“Heh. I don’t think so. I don’t really have a voice for public speaking.” If he had a voice like Cecil, that would be another story. Carlos pondered the idea of having Cecil deliver a presentation on his behalf. It would actually be a decent demonstration of the software, especially if he used it to deliver a presentation about itself. Of course, he would have to avoid speaking, unless he wanted everyone to hear his thinner, less confident voice next to the honeyed sounds of Cecil. But then, maybe it could actually _work_ to portray his own voice alongside Cecil’s…

“Carlos? You okay? You seem to be drifting off.”

Carlos shook his head. “Sorry. I just had an idea.”

“What sort of idea?”

“Oh, just a programming thing. Pretty boring, really.”

\---

“There’s a man in a jacket, holding a leather suitcase, outside my door, Cecil.”

Emulating a particular voice had proven a challenge, but most of that was trying to _choose_ a particular voice to emulate. Once settled on using his own, the challenge became the enjoyable kind rather than the tedious kind.

(He wouldn’t notice until after he’d exported the audio that the man in the tan jacket had originally been holding a deerskin suitcase, not a leather one. He reasoned that it didn’t really matter.)

Carlos knew his own voice better than anyone else’s, so it was easier to tell what adjustments were needed in order to make it more accurate. Plus, he finally got a chance to listen to external audio that represented the way his voice really sounded to him. Recordings always got it wrong, distorting his voice so that it wasn’t recognizable as the one that rang in his head when he spoke.

It was nice, too, to have his voice play and hear Cecil gleefully expound about it. He held back from writing any sort of reciprocating praise in his own emulated voice, or even any indication of reciprocated affection at all. Having a record of software gushing about him was odd, but he’d grown comfortable with it. Creating a record of a version of himself gushing back… just took things too far. Besides, Carlos already knew precisely how he felt about Cecil. Hearing himself express those feelings out loud wouldn’t be as gratifying as hearing Cecil express the same sort of feelings about him. Just hearing his voice come out of the same software that produced Cecil was enough.

Cecil said, “I want to soak my ears in the oaky tones of our community’s most significant outsider,” and Carlos wanted nothing more than to oblige him.

He didn’t actually think of his own voice as “oaky.” “Reedy,” maybe, would describe how he heard himself. He’d been told he had an oaky voice back in college, when he was working on a project with… Melinda, he thought was the name. It had been a long time ago. She’d said Carlos should do their whole presentation because of his oaky voice. Then again, she had been attempting, through a combination of flirtation and flattery, to get Carlos to do the presentation so that she wouldn’t have to speak in front of the class, so maybe she’d been exaggerating somewhat. It hadn’t worked, anyway; they each did half of the presentation. She was resentful, but Carlos thought it went at least as well as it would have if he’d done it alone.

The software still wasn’t great at sounding conversational. Carlos could get either Cecil’s voice or his own to sound like it was providing part of a conversation, but getting them to sound like they were both having the same conversation didn’t work out. He found a workaround for the meantime. When the virtual Carlos spoke, it was in the form of phone messages, which came out sounding more natural than a direct dialog between the two voices would have.

And even though he wouldn’t make himself actually produce audio of the conversation that led up to it, he got to hear Cecil squeal over their plans for a coffee date, and that was the best thing he’d heard all day. It even, Carlos thought, made up for one of the worst mornings he had ever had.


	17. Valentine

The thing about Valentine’s Day is it’s a made-up bullshit corporate holiday.

The other thing about Valentine's Day is it’s a made-up bullshit corporate holiday with _teeth_.

Carlos was determined to have a pleasant evening to himself, this year. He was going to ignore the holiday as much as possible. He planned to stay in, make dinner, and watch a movie. Maybe later in the evening he’d listen to Cecil for a while.

He sat down on his couch with his dinner (a stir fry, easy to make) in hand and started the movie ( _The Cabin in the Woods_ , one of his favorites). He watched the group of college kids leave for their ill-fated weekend getaway as he ate, reflecting that this was a really nice plan and he was really enjoying his time at home for once.

He’d just finished eating and was putting his plate down on the coffee table when he got a text. It was annoying because he had to look at his phone instead of looking at the TV, where the guy who played Thor was shirtless and jumping into a lake. It was doubly annoying because the text was from Steve.

“ _Happy Valentine’s Day. Thinking of you._ ” Said the text. There was also a box indicating a non-ascii character. Steve was always using fancy emoticons in texts, regardless of whether the person he was texting would be able to see them properly.

“ _You know my phone can’t render emoji._ ”

Replying was a bad idea. Carlos should have just ignored the text. But Steve had this way of provoking Carlos, of getting him to engage against his better judgement. And Carlos had told Steve dozens of times that those cutesy extras in his texts didn’t come through. Why couldn’t Steve get that through his head?

A couple of minutes later, Bradley Whitford was saying “What do you want from me? If they were creative they wouldn’t be in maintenance,” and that was Carlos’ favorite line but he missed it because Steve texted him again.

“ _Sorry. I forgot. I guess it happens to the best of us. ;)_ ”

Of course. Carlos should have realized that the only reason Steve might contact him tonight would be to berate him for the royal mess he’d made of Valentine’s Day last year. He couldn’t just let that slip by. Steve was being a jerk and needed to know it.

“ _The ‘best of us’ learn how to forgive as well as forget._ ”

Barely any time passed before Steve came back with “ _Sure. You forgive me for sometimes sending you images you can’t see, and I’ll forgive you for forgetting the single most important holiday for couples.”_

_“It was a year ago, Steve.”_

_“It still hurts, Carlos.”_

_“Well that’s not my responsibility to worry about anymore, is it?”_

The next response took a while. It came in while Carlos was watching the ill-fated college kids explore a creepy basement.

“ _I just thought that maybe for once I’d get a little sympathy out of you._ ”

That was it. Steve, the epitome of insensitivity, was begging _Carlos_ for sympathy? Carlos wrote out the first half of several different responses before deciding he’d dug himself in too deep already. He couldn’t go back in time and ignore the first text, but he could sure as hell stop engaging now.

In retrospect, he should have turned the phone off. After some time had passed without getting a response, Steve went ahead and texted again, just as the dad from _Six Feet Under_ was shouting “Fuck you!” at a bunch of Japanese kids.

_“Okay, maybe that was a little unfair. It’s just hard, you know? Being single on Valentine’s Day. It sucks way more than last year did.”_

_“Well it’s good to know a fight with me is preferable to self-pity.”_

He didn’t know when he sent it whether he wanted Steve to take it as sarcastic or sincere, but he figured he meant it as the opposite of whichever way Steve would read it.

“ _Come to think of it, maybe that fight was worse than being alone. It just happened so long ago it doesn’t feel that bad anymore._ ”

A flat-out reversal was one of the responses Carlos had _not_ been anticipating. Either Steve was getting at something, or he was genuinely confused and working through his emotions. Either way, Carlos had run out of patience for Steve’s bullshit.

“ _Okay, whatever. But we broke up, Steve. This is officially Not My Problem._ ”

Carlos awaited Steve’s response, hoping vaguely that there wouldn’t be one, but more wanting to see some sort of “You’re right I shouldn’t have bothered you” acknowledgement. On his TV Amy Acker said “ _They’re_ celebrating. _I’m_ drinking,” and Carlos thought that drinking wasn’t a half bad idea. That was one of the problems with Steve; Carlos looked to things like alcohol just to get through a simple conversation with him.

There was no booze in his home, though, and even if there was, he didn’t want to overdo it and have trouble at work the next morning. It wasn’t that long since he’d shown up an hour late and ranting about clocks being wrong.

“ _I just keep thinking back to that night as the point where I really should have realized our relationship wasn’t working._ ”

Besides, he needed to be sober or else he was definitely going to say something to Steve that his better judgement should tell him not to.

“ _So?_ ” Texted Carlos.

_“You showed absolutely no sign of caring about my wants or needs. It was the most selfish I’d ever seen you. Even after I explained how important the day was to me, you went ahead and ignored it entirely.”_

_“It was a year ago in a relationship that doesn’t exist anymore. LET IT GO.”_

The film set was covered in fake blood. Carlos wasn’t watching anymore, too focused on reading Steve’s incoming texts and composing his own responses, but he heard the elevator ding and knew exactly which scene was playing.

“ _Still,_ ” Steve texted, “ _after the fight was over, the sex that night was pretty great, right?_ ”

Carlos’ hands were shaking with some combination of shock and rage as he pecked out his response. “ _Did you seriously text me tonight just because you wanted to talk about some sex we had a year ago?_ ”

“ _Come on. It’s not like I had an ulterior motive for wishing you a happy Valentine’s Day._ ”

That text was almost immediately followed by another one, saying, “ _But I’ll admit it might have been on my mind._ ”

“ _You’re disgusting,_ ” sent Carlos.

On the screen, Bradley Whitford was firing a gun and looking like it was the worst day of his life. Carlos could relate.

“ _Come on. Are you honestly saying you haven’t been thinking about me too? Today of all days? You’ve been texting me all evening; there’s no way you’ve found someone new. Or if you have, you’re clearly not that into him if you have all this time to text me._ ”

“ _Well clearly you haven’t found… what was it you said you wanted? Someone ‘hotter and kinder’ than me. Or at least, none that are willing to put up with you._ ”

That seemed to shut Steve up for a little while. Rock music was playing over end credits by the time the next text came in.

“ _Maybe I said some things that I regret. Do you think that we could put that behind us just for one night? For Valentine’s Day?_ ”

Before responding, Carlos turned off the TV and the DVD player and put his plate in the sink. He needed the time to think about what to say. He should have been taking more time, taking more care, all evening.

“ _I have put it behind me._ ” He resisted adding “You’re the one who keeps bringing it up.” Antagonism was just going to draw out the conversation and he wanted it to be over.

Though it wasn’t terribly late, Carlos was exhausted. That was another unfortunate effect of dealing with Steve. The next time he checked his phone was after crawling into bed. There were two new messages.

“ _So what do you think? <3_” 

and

“ _I could be so hot for you right now. If you’d let me._ ”

Carlos was entirely too angry at Steve to find that alluring. He was still angry about their breakup, and he had just been reminded to be angry about last Valentine’s Day, and now he was angry about the stupid text conversation that had taken over his evening and interrupted his movie.

“ _Sex doesn’t solve anything, Steve._ ”

The response came almost immediately.

_“It worked pretty well last year.”_

_“Clearly, you and I remember last year very differently.”_

Carlos thought for a moment, came to a conclusion, and sent one more text.

“ _I’m turning my phone off now. Goodnight, Steve. Happy Valentine’s Day._ ”

He didn’t turn his phone off immediately. He waited to read Steve’s reply.

“ _Okay. I didn’t mean to bug you. I’m just lonely. I’m not like you. Stuff like this affects me emotionally. Not all of us can be robots._ ”

There may have been more followups, but Carlos knew he would be better off not reading them. At least, not until the morning, and possibly not even then. He powered his phone off and burrowed into his sheets.

He didn’t think he was like a robot. He had emotions. Steve just didn’t see them. Steve was so wrapped up in his own feelings he never bothered to take notice of anyone else’s. Steve… had been out of Carlos’ life for the better part of a year and could still reliably make Carlos feel like shit.

For the second year in a row, Carlos spent Valentine’s Day crying himself to sleep. The difference was that this year, he didn’t have Steve next to him, sleeping peacefully, leaving Carlos equal parts relieved that he wasn’t bothering Steve, and furious that Steve didn’t notice his distress.

Carlos thought that the only way Valentine’s Day could be worse was if it involved a massive death toll. Indeed, he reflected in his last waking moments, a massive death toll might actually be an improvement.


	18. The Traveler

“We have much better when I am from.”

Carlos didn’t even notice the typo until Cecil spoke the sentence out loud. The word “when” stood out, enunciated in such a way to draw attention to the discrepancy. Given that Cecil normally sounded so natural, Carlos imagined that the program had intentionally pointed out his error to him. It was a ridiculous thought, but a welcome one.

Something gave Carlos pause as his finger moved toward the Backspace key. “When I am from” was, he thought, far more interesting than “where I am from.” The way Cecil had said it, Carlos could believe the phrase was spoken intentionally. He thought about the kind of circumstances that might make someone talk about “when” they were from. Obviously, the speaker was some kind of time traveler.

A whole scenario jumped into Carlos’ head, a man on a mission from the future, destined to save reality while also ensuring his own eventual existence.

“‘We have much better when I am from,’ said the traveler according to one report, which I am choosing to believe. He added, ‘That’s right, I said when and not where.’ He then winked.”

An email came in from Al, with his thoughts on Carlos’ earlier efforts to “make the program sound like someone in the middle of chewing.”

_Carlos,_

_This is okay, but it lacks realism. I think the issue is that it’s just the voice, with no other sound effects. I mean, I’m sure it’s the best you could do with the resources available to you, but it’s something of a let down. I guess I won’t be including that clip in the big demo next month._

_\--Al_

Carlos sighed. Of course the audio didn’t include any other sound effects. Cecil didn’t _do_ sound effects. Al hadn’t even asked for sound effects, before registering his disappointment that they were missing.

Carlos could add crunching noises. He imported the disappointing clip into an audio editing program and added in some stock sound effects. It wasn’t that difficult. A year ago Carlos wouldn’t have known how to do it, but a year ago, Carlos hadn’t yet spent several months trying to wrangle Cecil into shape and teaching himself about audio engineering as he went.

He sent the augmented clip to Al.

_Is this more what you had in mind?_

_We can’t do this just using the software. I added the sound effects after exporting the vocals. Incorporating a sound editing suite and an effects library into the speech synthesis software would be insanely complicated. We’d be better off bundling the speech synth in an audio editing suite, but Night Vale doesn’t make an audio editing suite._

_I don’t know exactly where you were thinking of going with this line of experimentation, so I won’t keep speculating, but if you want to do something in particular just let me know and I’ll see if I can make the impossible happen for you._

_\--Carlos_

Most of the time it seemed that Al had no particular end goal in mind with most of his requests, that he was just trying to find Cecil’s limits, whatever those may be. But he definitely seemed pleased when Carlos pushed Cecil beyond his previous capabilities, so there was probably a desire to improve the software as well as document current capabilities.

Having taken care of Al’s immediate requests, Carlos turned his attention to his personal project for the day. Not the time traveler story; that still fell under official “testing the software” business. It was time for Carlos to listen to Cecil say lovely things about him for a few minutes.

He’d already written the setup. Cecil and the rest of the imaginary Night Vale Community Radio staff all vehemently denied the existence of mountains, and it was time to correct that denial.

“A few days ago, Carlos, Night Vale’s most attractive scientist, whom we had fortunately not included in our list of mountain-believers, took us for a drive out to a mountain. We looked at the mountain, and even touched it, and it was definitely real. Sadly, we were not invited to touch Carlos. However, we are now forced to admit that there is indeed at least one mountain in this world, and we apologize for our previous energetic assertions to the contrary.

“I would like to add my own apology to Carlos, for doubting his perfection when it came to the subject of mountains and the belief in their existence, and for my unjustifiably wary behavior when we arrived at the mountain. Carlos, I do hope you will find it in your undoubtedly kind and warm heart to forgive me. If you would like to get together sometime so that I may apologize in a more personal fashion, well, you have my number. Just let me know.”

Carlos leaned back in his chair, a stupid grin on his face as he listened to Cecil’s overtures. These little indulgences were what got him through the day. He’d reach some milestone in his workload, then devote some time to his fantasy relationship. The difficult part was tearing himself away and going back to his actual assignments, but Carlos was nothing if not disciplined.

And he was about to go back to those actual assignments when he noticed a text from Julie.

_Can you come to the break room? We’ve got a few people here and we can use your input._

Rather than replying, Carlos figured he’d just head to the break room and see what was up.

It was surprisingly crowded when Carlos got there. That time of day, there would usually only be two or three people hanging out in the break room. Even at lunch, it was rare for more than a handful to gather there… it wasn’t that big a room, and the Night Vale work force weren’t a particularly gregarious bunch.

Carlos squeezed into the room, looking for Julie to ask her why she’d summoned him. Julie was sitting on the couch talking to Evan, another accountant, one whom Carlos knew reasonably well. Shortly after Carlos saw her, a hand tapped on her shoulder. The owner of the hand was Harry, the programmer with the cubicle next to Carlos’. Whatever was going on must be important if programmers and accountants were willingly spending time together.

Harry got Julie’s attention and pointed to Carlos. Looking in his direction, Julie stood up. Thinking back to that moment, Carlos would remember a hush falling over the room, but at the time he was aware of no such thing happening.

“Hi, Carlos,” said Julie. Evan nudged her, and then she added, “This is an intervention.”

At first, Carlos missed the point. “Really? For who?” He said.

“Who do you think?” Asked Julie.

“I…” Carlos hesitated, looking around at everyone, an assortment of accountants and programmers, and Gil from IT, and trying to think of any connection they might all have in common. Any connection, that is, aside from being familiar with Carlos.

“Carlos, this is a safe space.” Harry was speaking.

“What… I’m sorry, what is this about?” Asked Carlos, eyes darting from person to person, wondering what problem he might possibly have that would bring all of them together like this. He wasn’t a drug user, rarely drank to excess, and maybe he’d let his apartment go somewhat to hell since he’d been single again, but he was pretty sure it took at least twice as much junk as he possessed to qualify as a hoarder. Carlos just didn’t think he was the sort of person who’d need an intervention. None of the serious problems in his life seemed _that_ severe, and most of them were the type of problem that no one else at work should know anything about.

Harry said, “It’s become evident that you are unhealthily obsessed with that software Al’s got you working on.”

Like that one.

“This is about _Cecil?”_ Carlos exclaimed.

Julie responded. “See, right there. You gave it a name. And… I swear, the other day, we were talking about it, and you referred to it as ‘he.’ That’s… that kind of personification just can’t be a good thing, Carlos.”

“And,” Gil chimed in, “there’s this.” He hit a button on a remote, and the break room speakers crackled to life.

A familiar voice poured out of them, saying, “Well, I just got off the phone with Carlos, listeners and we have a date!”

For a moment, Carlos’ mind went blank, and all he could think was _No_. This couldn’t be happening. His most intimate, most precious indulgence, being aired in public. He hadn’t shared that audio with _anyone_. Al hadn’t even heard it, and no one else had any reason listen to Cecil.

“-I think it applies to dating as well.” The audio concluded, the speakers returning to silence, and Carlos realized that he’d zoned out, missed most of the clip. Probably for the best. He was trapped somewhere between embarrassment and outrage, somewhere that seemed to coincide with complete paralysis. He couldn’t speak, could barely _think_ , was stuck just… staring... at his coworkers, who were all maintaining carefully sympathetic expressions.

Evan spoke up. “Now, there are some of us who believe that what we’re hearing isn’t evidence of a problem at all, that it’s just you joking around in your spare time. And, if that’s the case, then we’re sorry to bother you.”

“But,” interjected Derrick, another programmer, “If that’s not the case, then, well, we’d rather get you the help you need than risk you getting into trouble because we ignored the first sign that something was wrong.”

“Right,” said Evan. “So, Carlos, just be honest with us. These files… are they just a little fun you’re having with yourself, the sort of thing we can all ignore and laugh about later, or are they serious? I mean… are you or are you not genuinely infatuated with a piece of software?”

If Carlos had been quick enough on the uptake, he could have lied. In retrospect, he wished he had immediately said “Of course not! That’s ridiculous. I’m just messing around. I mean, don’t you think whoever buys this software is gonna use it much the same way? Who wouldn’t want to hear a stranger compliment them all day long?”

But in the moment, it didn’t occur to him that lying was something he could do. They’d caught him; he was out of options. He tried to speak, to say something mitigating or to justify what he’d been up to, but when he opened his mouth there was no sound. Nothing that he thought of to say made sense. He held a hand over his face, wishing that everyone would just go away.

“Yeah, that’s what I thought,” said Derrick.

Evan said, “I’m sorry.”

“So, Carlos,” said Julie, “Just to be clear, no one is trying to cast shame on you or make you feel bad. You’re coping with things your own way, and that’s fine, but this is not an appropriate coping mechanism. It seems clear that you’re still processing your last relationship, which is understandable, but it’s been, what, a year?”

“Ten months this Sunday,” said Carlos.

“See, you’re still counting the days. It’s time to move on, Carlos. That doesn’t necessarily mean a new relationship, but it also _definitely_ doesn’t mean constructing some surreal fantasy during your work hours. You need to concern yourself with the real world, with the people and relationships that are already important to you in real life. Try dating someone new, or join a book club, or get involved in actual local politics instead of going on about some five-headed dragon running for mayor.”

_Hiram McDaniels_ , Carlos mentally corrected, but thankfully refrained from saying out loud. A moment later it occurred to him that Hiram hadn’t been part of that clip Gil had played. Carlos hadn’t written anything about Hiram in months. Someone hadn’t just accidentally come across the most damning thing Cecil had ever said; at least one of his coworkers had listened extensively to Cecil’s catalogue.

“Wait,” he said, wanting time to think as well as to respond. “Where… How do any of you even _know_ about this?”

“Um, me,” said Gil.

“And how did _you_ know?”

Gil shrugged. “I was doing updates on your computer, and I came across one of the recordings and I thought it was funny so I looked for more.”

“He’s been sharing them with the rest of us for a while,” said Julie. “You’re a surprisingly good writer. For a programmer, I mean.”

_High praise, coming from an accountant,_ Carlos didn’t say, because even while he was hurt he couldn’t bring himself to be mean-spirited.

“I got into it through that Marcus Vansten bit. That was hilarious.” Anne, the lone woman in the programming department, was speaking.

“Oh, yeah! And the whole thing with the feral dogs!” Said someone. Carlos was beginning to lose track of who was speaking.

“You mean _plastic bags.”_

“My favorite bit was the Glow Cloud.”

“Oh, I loved the whole ‘Why isn’t the moon watching us?’ thing.”

_“All hail.”_

“But seriously, the man in the tan jacket creeps me out.”

Everyone was talking, the sounds flooding the room and overwhelming Carlos. These people had all been listening to the things he had written, most of them things he had _never intended_ for other people to hear.

“Those are _my files,”_ said Carlos, his voice rising above the cacophany. “You can’t just go through and-”

“Actually, they’re _Night Vale’s_ files,” interrupted Gil. “And I certainly _can_ go through anything stored on a Night Vale computer. In fact, I am _obligated_ to do so, to a certain extent, during the course of my job. I need to make sure the company computers are free of viruses and corrupted files. I may have overstepped the absolute requirements of my job, but I by no means overstepped my authority.”

“But this is… You people from IT never understand!” Carlos pointed a finger accusingly at Gil. “When I’m _working_ on something, I keep all of my old files so I can gage my progress, no matter how old or embarrassing they are. It doesn’t mean I’m ready to show them to other people! You can’t just come into an incomplete project and hope to have any idea how things are going or what I was trying to do at the time. It’s complicated, and it requires a lot of concentration, and it’s really hard to do get anything done while people are listening over your shoulder!”

Julie spoke up. “Carlos, this isn’t about Gil.”

“No! It’s about all of you! You don’t respect me or my work, you just listen to the fruits of my labors without permission and use it to ridicule and pity me!”

“It’s not about us, either. We’re just the easiest target for you to lash out at right now.” Julie took a breath. “I don’t think you’d be this upset with us if you didn’t think we were right.”

“Well, out of the two of us, you’re definitely the expert on why I’m upset.”

“Okay,” replied Julie, “Why don’t you take a moment. Gather your thoughts. Tell us your honest opinion. Because in the end, it really doesn’t matter what we think. You’re the only one who can figure out what’s appropriate for your own life.” She nudged Harry to get off the couch. “You can sit down if you’d like, Carlos.”

Carlos shook his head before pressing his palms to his eyes. He really didn’t want to see all the people staring at him right then. “I don’t mind standing,” he said.

They gave him the moment Julie had suggested, the room falling uncomfortably quiet for that number of people. Carlos knew he’d have to think carefully about the next thing he said. It would have to be good, in order to make everyone leave him alone. Some devastating comment that would make them all realize what a gross invasion of privacy they’d committed, and that any inference about his personal life was unfounded and based on insufficient evidence. But he couldn’t come up with anything, because as Julie had pointed out, that was just a smokescreen. It didn’t address the real issue, which was that they were right. Carlos was obsessed with Cecil. And maybe it hadn’t negatively impacted his life yet, but it couldn’t spell good things for his future.

So what to say? An apology? An admission of guilt? A promise to do better next time?

He settled on a plea for help. “What do I do?” He asked, removing his hands from his eyes and staring despondently at Julie.

The atmosphere in the room seemed calmer after that, almost relieved. “Well,” Julie admitted, “That’s tricky. I know that, the way your department is organized, you can’t really ask Al to reassign you.”

Carlos’ eyes widened at the mere suggestion. Ceasing work on Cecil would be… too much.

Seeing his terrified expression, Julie explained. “I researched methods for dealing with addictive behavior. I know this isn’t a chemical dependency, but I think it might be comparable. In most cases, it’s recommended that people cut out all activity involving their addiction completely… alcoholics need to avoid drinking any alcohol at all, smokers need to stay away from any and all cigarettes, and so on… but that’s not always practical. Like, there are food addicts, and it’s supposed to be much harder for them to recover, because you can’t just stop eating. So they have to carefully monitor themselves at every meal, make sure to only eat exactly enough and nothing further. And even though it’s hard, there are people who do it. So whatever it feels like, I don’t think you’re a lost cause.

“I think there’s a very strong chance that this whole thing with the software is just a symptom of a greater issue. You’re probably dealing with depression. It would be a good idea to see a counsellor about that, and then maybe other parts of your life will just start falling into place. I mean, it’s worked for me, in the past, so I’m not just talking out of my ass here. I’ll email you my therapist’s phone number.

“More immediately… I know you have to keep working with the software, but you can try to keep it more professional. Avoid using your own name and stuff like that. Basically cut out all the virtual flirting. Force yourself to think of the software as software instead of an imaginary boyfriend. And, um, if you ever want to talk about anything… I’m here for you. Let me know if you have any questions or concerns or worries or anything. Like, if you can’t tell whether something you’re doing is… potentially problematic, you can just get my opinion on it. How does that sound?”

Carlos swallowed. “That sounds…”

_Dreadful._

_Impossible._

_Terrifying._

“That sounds good.”

A few minutes later, the crowd in the break room had dispersed, several of them giving Carlos handshakes or reassuring pats on the back as they left. Julie gave him a hug and told him to stay in contact with her. When they were all gone, Carlos walked back to his cubicle in a daze.

What was he supposed to do? Stop making Cecil talk about him, right.

He was probably supposed to stop calling the software “Cecil,” too, but he didn’t think there was much chance of that happening. It had been Cecil for months now. That would be a tough habit to break.

Technically speaking the stuff about Carlos taking Cecil to look at a mountain didn’t count, because he wrote it when the intervention hadn’t happened yet. But, the audio was still waiting for export, so Carlos went ahead and edited out any mention of himself. He was certain the clip was now less engaging than it had been before, but he was willing to settle for it also being less incriminating.

Carlos tried to focus on the things Al wanted him to do (“Can you make the voice sound cheerier? It would be great if we could license this out but right now it might be just a little too sombre and off-putting.”) but he didn’t even know where to begin. Normally working with Cecil came so naturally, was so rewarding, that he just breezed through, or when there was a problem, gladly kept working at it until he’d arrived at some sort of solution. But now… any time he tried to think of a test phrase, or even a test word, his mind just went blank.

It wasn’t just that he was trying to emotionally distance himself from Cecil, though that was undoubtedly a part of it. He also kept thinking, any time he rested his hands on his keyboard, that dozens of his coworkers would hear whatever he wrote. He was under their scrutiny, and the thought was paralyzing. He’d never been comfortable putting himself in the public eye, or ear, in this case. All those times he’d secretly wondered whether the people he knew were scrutinizing everything he did, when he’d told himself he was being ridiculous and paranoid because nobody could care that much about what he was doing… well, he had a different perspective now, and it didn’t seem quite so ridiculous anymore.

He turned off his monitor and took some deep breaths. He didn’t think he was going to get any more work done that day. That stupid intervention had ruined the whole afternoon. He was more embarrassed than he’d been about the clocks incident, more paranoid than he’d been when Marcus Vansten first got out, more angry than he’d been when Steve left him. 

Under different circumstances, he’d work out his feelings by writing something out for Cecil to say, but it seemed unwise to…

No, wait, it seemed _totally_ wise. At least, it seemed like a better idea than sitting in his cubicle staring at a blank screen. Best make it look like he was working.

Carlos embarked on some self-parody. “60% of all working citizens live in a self-created dome of obstinance, distraction, and-” what was it Julie had said? Oh, right, “Surreal fantasy.”

He kept going, hoping that the irony of what he was doing would make up for the fact that he was basically still just making excuses to listen to Cecil. Julie may have been advocating as much of a cold-turkey method as possible, but Carlos thought baby steps were acceptable.

“The NVPA assures us that taking what you see at face value, even if only for a few minutes daily, is the most efficient way to live. It saves the mind from the emotional stress of self-fiction and skepticism.”

Carlos wrote a little more, with the idea that he could create a sort of meta-commentary, a delusion arising in his tirade against delusions. “The NVPA statement adds that you look good in that shirt, and that you should wear tighter clothing.” That last sentence, admittedly, was just an excuse to hear compliments said with Cecil’s voice, but Carlos thought he could get away with it.

He went on. “People want to see what you look like under there!” Said Cecil, quoting the Night Vale Psychological Association. Which, once Carlos listened to it, sounded unmistakably creepy. Like the sort of thing Steve might say.

“‘God, I miss you so much,’ the report concludes. Clearly, Steve Carlsberg, spokesperson for the NVPA, failed to maintain an appropriately detached and professional outlook when delivering his report at a press conference this morning. An inappropriately personal addendum to an otherwise impassive report is just the sort of thing that I would expect from Mr. Carlsberg. He is a discredit to the NVPA and to our community in general.”

A wry smile appeared on Carlos’ face while he listened. He would never get tired of hearing Cecil disparaging Steve. It was almost as good as the usual compliments about Carlos’ hair.

The smile vanished when Carlos considered what Julie would say when she heard a crack about Steve. It was possible most of the other coworkers had forgotten the name of Carlos’ ex, or even that he _had_ an ex, but Julie was close to him. She knew.

She’d even mentioned the breakup in the intervention. And thought she hadn’t brought up Cecil’s previous mentions of Steve Carlsberg, there was no way she’d consider railing against Steve to be a healthy use of the speech-synth software. And, Carlos remembered, with a paralyzing resurgence of paranoia, Julie would be listening. They’d _all_ be listening. And at least one of them would disapprove.

For the second time that day, Carlos deleted something he was extremely fond of, because he was worried it would get him in trouble. The NVPA bit ended a little abruptly, now, but Carlos felt defeated and he couldn’t bring himself to work on it any more just then.

He checked his email, and saw that Julie had followed through with the name and phone number of a therapist. Carlos spent the next few minutes Googling, discovering that this therapist had a higher rate than he could reasonably afford, and wasn’t covered by his insurance plan. Julie should have known that, since presumably she was also insured through Night Vale. Unless she’d gone to see this person before she got her current job, or at a time when that insurance was accepted, or maybe she just made enough that paying out of pocket wasn’t a big deal.

It wasn’t even like Carlos was actually depressed, he thought with a huff of annoyance. Julie didn’t know what she was talking about. A lot of people had trouble adjusting after difficult breakups, and focusing all of one’s energy on a single project for the sake of distraction was common. Carlos had absolutely nothing to worry about.

There was just under an hour left before Carlos could go home and shut the day’s troubles out of his mind. He knew he wasn’t going to get any more work done in the meantime. So, despite the… inadvisability… of the idea, Carlos cued up all of the audio he’d generated so far that day, and spent the next half hour listening to Cecil.

That beautiful voice washed over him, and he knew his coworkers were right in seeing a problem, but he lacked the strength to tear himself away. He lost himself in the surreal fantasy he’d earlier wrought.

Cecil relayed suspicion regarding the visitor from the future. “He does not seem adequately respectful of forbidden areas, and he has already married Night Vale’s third most beautiful woman, Cactus Julie.”

Carlos laughed, cruelly and derisively. He’d forgotten writing Julie into the time traveler story. He knew she was fond of time travel, and stuck in her name as a sort of secret compliment. At the time, he hadn’t thought she was likely to ever hear it.

Obviously, Julie couldn’t be permitted to hear Cecil say her name. For one thing, she most definitely would not approve. She could get the impression that Carlos was just displacing Cecil’s praises onto Julie instead of himself, or that he was trying to suck up to her.

Also, he was pretty annoyed with Julie at the moment and thought that he’d like to rescind the compliment. He hastily went through and replaced her name with Jane or June or Judy or whatever, making no pains to be consistent. He figured time travel meant that inconsistencies wouldn’t really be a problem. Maybe Julie would hear the many names of Night Vale’s third most beautiful woman and wonder why hers wasn’t among them. A silent form of revenge for what she was putting Carlos through.

It was still several minutes before five when Carlos gave up, turned his monitor off, and stalked out of the building, mentally daring anyone to comment on him leaving early. He didn’t even bother to export the audio he’d generated that day. It could wait. For the meantime, Carlos just needed to get away from his cubicle and his computer and everyone he’d seen in the breakroom.

All the way home, he fantasized about using time travel to make it all better, somehow. Warning himself to stay away from the break room, maybe. Or planning things out so he could have reassured everyone that he _didn’t_ have a problem involving the speech synth software. Ultimately, though, he doubted he would have been able to avoid it. Maybe he could have delayed the inevitable, or maybe mitigated the short-term embarrassment and shame, but eventually, he would have had to face his problems. It just so happened that “eventually” had turned out to mean “today.”


	19. The Sandstorm

_Carlos,_

_I think I’ve mentioned to you that we were thinking of licensing out the software. Well, we have an interested party._

_A week from today we’re going to demo for Desert Bluffs, a subsidiary of StrexCorp Synernists, Inc. They’d probably be lured in more easily if we have the software drop those company names and talk them up a little, hint hint._

_One thing that might count against us is the sombre, almost ominous tone that the default voice tends to adopt. I’d also like to show off a wider range, demonstrate that the software can sound like more than one person. Maybe we could solve both problems by showing off one other voice, and making it one that sounds cheerier? You could even have both voices say the same sentence, just to highlight how different they are. Just a thought._

_I’ll need all the audio samples I’m going to use by end of day tomorrow so that I have time to incorporate them into my presentation._

_I know you’ll be able to deliver something great._

_\--Al_

Carlos’ first order of business was to do some research into Desert Bluffs and StrexCorp. He already knew that Desert Bluffs produced software, and was one of Night Vale’s primary rivals. They had one or two products in direct competition with Night Vale, and Carlos had been poking fun at them for almost the entire time he’d been working with Cecil, but he wasn’t very familiar with the company. Until Al’s email he hadn’t even known that, unlike Night Vale, Desert Bluffs was beholden to a corporate master.

When he typed StrexCorp into Google, the top of the page displayed a helpful summary, complete with one of the most hideous logos Carlos had ever seen.

There was a smiley face, inside a triangle, with little icons of people at each of the vertices. The people had their arms held above their heads, towards the triangle. At first Carlos thought they were lying prone with their arms held out in a worshipful pose, but then he thought that maybe they were holding the triangle aloft. Neither one seemed like the _intended_ interpretation, but Carlos was at a loss to figure out what the hell _that_ was supposed to be.

And, along each side of the triangle, there was the word Strex. So the logo seemed to be saying “Strex Strex Strex.” Looking closer, Carlos saw that there were more words, between the “Strex”es and the triangle sides, but, in another questionable design choice, they were too small for him to make them out on the image thumbnail. He clicked to make it full-size and read “Look around you,” Look inside you,” and “Go to sleep.”

That was… an extraordinarily unsettling corporate slogan. It really put a cap on the logo’s creepiness.

Wikipedia’s entry on StrexCorp contained a whole section about the logo. Apparently it had been an in-house contest winner, an attempt to “let the people of StrexCorp make their influence known.” Really, Carlos knew, it would have been an attempt to save the cost of hiring an actual graphic designer.

One point that was commonly made when comparing Night Vale products to those of Desert Bluffs was that Night Vale stuff looked better. Carlos thought there was probably a connection.

The slogan had its own Wikipedia section. Apparently it was meant to be read as “Look around you: Strex. Look inside you: Strex. Go to sleep: Strex.” A little different than how Carlos had been reading it, “Look around you. Look inside you. Go to sleep. Strex Strex Strex.”

Apparently, the slogan had been developed when the corporation was first founded. It “expressed the belief that StrexCorp could provide for any and all needs. The founder suggested that the day would come when every aspect of waking life would be impacted by Strex products, and further speculated that customers would dream of Strex products while they slept.”

That was still creepy in the “overbearing corporation taking over every aspect of our lives” sense, but not quite as creepy as a slogan just outright telling people to go to sleep with no other context.

The funniest thing about StrexCorp’s image problem (as Carlos saw it) was that apparently one of the companies they owned was a rather large and respectable marketing firm. Why they wouldn’t use their own resources to market themselves, Carlos couldn’t tell. He suspected that maybe StrexCorp wasn’t terribly well organized.

The Desert Bluffs logo was simpler and less questionable: A stylized sun, which just played into the competition with Night Vale and their stylized moon. It seemed that the StrexCorp takeover of Desert Bluffs was fairly recent, having occurred only within the past year. Carlos smirked as he reflected that Desert Bluffs had required some big corporate power to come to its rescue, while Night Vale had weathered all the recent financial upheavals and the trouble with Marcus Vansten just fine.

But of course, now wasn’t the time for animosity towards Desert Bluffs. Carlos needed to say _good_ things about Desert Bluffs, or at least to get Cecil to talk in such a way that Desert Bluffs would be enamored with him.

With _it._

Carlos wasn’t prepping a friend for an ordeal.

He was honing a piece of software for a presentation.

He’d been _trying_ , over the past couple of weeks, to stop personifying Cecil so much. There’d been mixed results.

One of the problems was that the software didn’t have a name. The original file name had been a defunct project designation that didn’t mean anything anymore. Carlos had renamed it “Speech Synth” when he started working with it, so that he could actually find the right thing when he wanted to open it. And about two months into working on it, he’d started calling it “Cecil.”

Titles for software were low priority, and typically left to a marketing team, because for some reason programmers weren’t entrusted with giving appealing names to things. So it was up to Carlos to come up with his own title for when he referred to the software in his head, and he had yet to come up with something better than Cecil.

And now Cecil -- the software -- needed to convince a room full of people from Desert Bluffs that he -- it -- was a good investment.

So Carlos needed to start thinking positive thoughts about Desert Bluffs and give Cecil something to say.

“Welcome to Desert Bluffs” was an easy enough start. It sounded off, in that way that inaccurate versions of famous quotations sound off, when the phrase just doesn’t go where one’s brain expects it to.

It also sounded ominous. But then, “ominous” was, in a fairly literal sense, Cecil’s default setting. Carlos could make Cecil sound happier, more enthusiastic. He adjusted the settings, putting them in much the same arrangement they’d been in for gushing about the “date” that Carlos now doubted he would ever get around to writing.

Now when Cecil said “Welcome to Desert Bluffs,” it sounded much more like a greeting than it did a warning.

Re-reading the email from Al, Carlos realized that Al had _not_ asked for Cecil’s default voice to sound cheerier. He’d asked for a _different_ voice, and for _that_ voice to be a cheery one. Well, Carlos had the cheerfulness covered. Messing around with the once-more easily accessible vocal quality sliders, he adjusted the timbre and raised the pitch.

“Welcome to Desert Bluffs!”

Cecil sounded unrecognizable. Carlos supposed that was good. It demonstrated the software’s versatility or somesuch. He shot off an email to Al with just that sample and the question, “Is this what you have in mind?”

He saved the new settings, then started going back and forth, having the two voices pronounce the same phrases to hear the differences. Even as innocuous a phrase as “This has been financial news” took on entirely different emotional qualities when spoken by Cecil in his default state and Cecil in his new arrangement.

Carlos found himself writing differently, depending on which voice he wanted to make speak. They just _felt_ so different, gave the impression of such disparate personalities, that having them say the exact same things felt unnatural.

“And now, traffic,” said Cecil in his regular voice.

“Let’s have a peek at traffic!” Said Cecil in his new voice.

Carlos couldn’t help but insert exclamation points when writing for the new voice. It was just so damn peppy. Cecil didn’t register a difference between exclamation points and periods, but Carlos thought that maybe he should add that feature. At a later time, though. After the presentation.

Now wasn’t the time to institute new features that would require experimentation and testing. Now was the time to impress Desert Bluffs. And StrexCorp.

StrexCorp who, Carlos supposed, might like to hear the speech synth software say their weird slogan.

“StrexCorp Synernists Incorporated. Look around you: Strex. Look inside you: Strex. Go to sleep: Strex.”

When said aloud by that cheery voice, the slogan only sounded creepier. Like the software had been taken over and corrupted by a third party. Like a malevolent entity was forcing Cecil to-

No. Not Cecil. That was what really bothered Carlos, the thought of Cecil presenting this other side of himself, that Cecil was so disingenuous that he could sound peppy and bright and that Carlos couldn’t tell whether this voice or the other one was more authentic. If he was going to be comfortable working with this new voice, he would have to stop thinking of it as Cecil.

Because it _wasn’t_ Cecil, not really. Cecil wasn’t the entire program; Cecil was a specific aspect of that program, the voice that Carlos worked with and with which Carlos had fallen in love.

This other voice, this… not-Cecil, needed a name. Carlos used the first one that popped into his head.

“This is Kevin,” said the new voice, and Carlos thought, _that will do._

He let the name sink into his mind while he did more research on StrexCorp. Apparently one of their largest holdings was a pharmaceutical company. Apparently that pharmaceutical company primarily manufactured antidepressants. That worked well enough with Kevin’s relentless cheeriness.

Carlos found himself perusing the Wikipedia page for an antidepressant. In clinical trials, the drug “assisted patients who had experienced severe trauma, particularly the loss of a loved one,” but it had “been recommended, in some cases, as a temporary treatment for patients recently diagnosed with depression.” It was supposed to help people “process life events that [they] had not adjusted to in a healthy manner.” After a few minutes reading about the benefits, Carlos started to wonder some sort of drug like that would be good for him. He was having difficulty adjusting to a life event, after all. And Julie thought he was depressed. And maybe it would be good to have something to help him move on from Steve. Maybe Carlos did have Cecil, but he understood where Julie was coming from when she told him that an imaginary computer crush did not count as moving on.

Then Carlos got to the section on drawbacks. Mentioned were mood swings, prohibitive costs, unethical prescriptions, and the occasional side-effect of _suicide._

Causing people to commit suicide seemed directly antithetical to the purpose of an antidepressant. If Carlos took something like that, something that was supposed to make him feel _better_ about his life, and it wound up making him give up the hope he still had… no. There was no way that risk was worth taking.

Besides, Carlos wasn’t depressed. That was Julie’s opinion, and she was wrong. Antidepressants and therapists were both things that Carlos just didn’t need.

Carlos started to imagine Kevin, working at Desert Bluffs Community Radio (because _obviously_ he would have the Desert Bluffs equivalent of Cecil’s job), totally hopped up on happy pills because his pain was extreme enough that the risk of suicide didn’t seem like a major drawback anymore. Suddenly the cheeriness seemed far more sinister than Cecil’s usual ominous tone.

All at once, Carlos was in a subversive mood. He added a piece to StrexCorp’s slogan, based on the bizarrely worshipful appearance of the stick figures in the logo.

“Believe in a smiling god: StrexCorp. It is everything.”

Carlos wrote more, mixing innocuous phrases to show off the program’s capabilities with unnerving implications about the state of Desert Bluffs. He alternated between Kevin and Cecil, weaving together a story wherein Night Vale and Desert Bluffs were connected in some significant way, and Desert Bluffs came off as a bright and happy place only from an internal, self-deluded perspective.

He realized he was being unfair to the real-world Desert Bluffs, which was likely no better or worse than his own company. It was Kevin’s fault, really. That voice just sounded… well, it sounded like the kind of voice that would give you a friendly greeting while its owner strangled you to death.

Kevin couldn’t even be a “he” to Carlos, the way Cecil was. That was less because Kevin didn’t feel like a real person than that Carlos would be _terrified_ of Kevin if he were a real person. He refused to entertain the thought.

Carlos hoped that Al wouldn’t find the new voice creepy. He’d hate to have to come up with an entirely different cheerful voice and give _it_ a name and imagine an entirely different nightmare scenario to explain the turmoil behind the cheery facade. There were only so many times a person could do that in a day.

Just before five, Al responded saying that the new voice was “sure to be a winner,” so Carlos relaxed somewhat. The audio samples weren’t due for another day, and he’d already basically written everything he needed. Sure, he’d wound up drifting away from a direct comparison between two voices, but there were still a few clips that would work. And he had all of tomorrow to sort through everything and decide what to send Al, to make sure that there was a wide sample showing off the program’s capabilities and sucking up to Desert Bluffs and hopefully not sounding too creepy. Carlos was _pretty_ sure he could put together a few choice moments with Kevin that would be fine.

As he left work, he was mulling over the difference between “creepy” and “ominous,” and wondering what the usual preference would be between the two.


	20. Poetry Week

All right, maybe Carlos was a little depressed. And maybe he’d been using his work with Cecil -- the speech synth software -- as a coping mechanism.

The thing is, he didn’t remember feeling depressed, or particularly emotional at all, before the intervention. There’d been a week or two, right after things ended with Steve, that he could look back on now and say “Sure, I was depressed at that time.” But he’d gotten a handle on things, mostly, before Cecil even entered the picture.

Since working with Cecil, Carlos had been fine. He thought he was fine. That parking ticket had affected him more than it maybe should have, but in Carlos’ defense, parking tickets were _really upsetting_. And Valentine’s Day sucked but that one was all Steve’s fault. Possibly Carlos ascribed fault to Steve for too many of his own problems, but in the case of Valentine’s Day he was definitely justified.

Oh, and there was that clocks-being-wrong incident. But really, anyone would have been upset to find themselves so disoriented.

Maybe now, looking back on his behavior for the past several months, he could identify some signs of trouble, but he hadn’t felt like anything was wrong at the time.

Since the intervention, he couldn’t _stop_ feeling like something was wrong.

Just in the past week he’d shouted at three of his coworkers, though one of them was Gil and so didn’t count because the people in IT weren’t really human. And he’d _almost_ lost it with Al. Al, one of the most genial people Carlos had ever met, certainly the easiest boss he’d ever had to deal with, had pushed Carlos to a breaking point. Carlos found himself grateful for the Al’s tendency to communicate from afar. He’d had time to calm down before hitting “Send” on a vicious email, when he knew that in person he wouldn’t have been able to refrain from saying aloud all of the things he’d typed.

And it really wasn’t Al’s fault. Sure, he should have checked to see whether Harry was actually in the office before telling Carlos to meet with him. And he should have known that Harry was on vacation this week, and waited until he was back before suggesting that he and Carlos work together.

But Carlos was the one who’d wasted an hour pacing back and forth between his cubicle and Harry’s. Al hadn’t _told_ him to do that, or even explicitly implied that Harry should be there. Carlos supposed that the occasional minor oversight was just human nature. Al had more responsibility than Carlos did, but that didn’t totally absolve Carlos from the responsibility to think carefully about Al’s requests and maybe sometimes consider the idea that Al might be working with incomplete information.

Still, when Al had finally sent Carlos a followup email saying “I got Harry’s auto-responder. Turns out he’s on vacation this week!”, Carlos had poured an hour’s worth of pent-up frustration into a reply that he was _really_ glad he’d had the presence of mind not to send.

He’d forced himself to wait half an hour before rewriting the email. During that time, he calmed down by listening to Cecil. Some of the old clips about Carlos’ beautiful hair. Those had all been exported prior to the intervention and therefore didn’t count. Besides, they had a positive effect on his demeanor, and he’d been able to reply to Al with a simple, courteous explanation that without Harry present, Carlos would need something else to work on.

Thankfully, Carlos had gotten himself in a fit enough mental state to be amused rather than annoyed when Al responded by sending him a zip folder containing dozens of nonsensical text documents.

Digging through them, Carlos eventually found one that contained an explanation. Why Al had included it like that instead of, say, in the body of the email he’d attached it to, Carlos couldn’t say.

_I can’t copy the dictation software over from Harry’s computer, and it doesn’t exist in the latest version anywhere else, and besides he’s not around to explain how it works and what he’s been doing with it. But here are some of the fruits of his labors. I know you can’t do much for now, but maybe this will give you an idea of what this thing can do?_

_Sorry I can’t be of more help._

_Al_

Understanding dawned in Carlos. The nonsense he was looking at was all the result of Harry’s software attempting to transcribe speech.

Carlos’ initial thought was that the dictation software couldn’t be very good, if most of the text it generated was incomprehensible. Of course, he soon realized that he didn’t have any context for the files he was looking at. They weren’t necessarily the best examples from Harry’s project, and besides, without hearing the audio that was transcribed, there was no way to tell how accurate the transcripts were.

So there was no need for Carlos to feel smug about his project being in better shape than Harry’s was.

He felt a little smug, anyway.

Al hadn’t provided any clear instructions, so Carlos contented himself for the time being with reading through the transcripts, letting himself laugh at the convoluted, nonsensical phrases. It wasn’t like Harry was there to overhear him.

“No one will. Have to be. Anyone. Ever again. In fact, it will not. Be allowed.”

That one was Carlos’ favorite. Just the words on their own formed a beautiful little microcosm of meaninglessness, but it was the punctuation that sold it. He couldn’t help wonder what it was about the original speech that resulted in so many full stops, whether the speaker paused or this was some bizarre application of a punctuation-determining algorithm. Whatever quirk of programming had resulted in that brief transcript, Carlos loved it.

He plugged the transcript into the speech synth software to see what Cecil would make of it. With that mellifluous voice reading it out, pausing dramatically at every period, it sounded lovely. Poetic, even. Like it was _intentionally_ obtuse and stilted.

“Hey, Carlos?”

Carlos pulled off his headphones like he was trying to hide something. He shouldn’t have been so jumpy; he was doing actual work, mostly. Al had basically told him to get Cecil and the dictation software working together somehow, even though manually entering the transcripts from the dictation software was hardly a practical melding of the programs. He turned around to see Evan standing at the cubicle entrance.

“Yeah, Evan?”

“I was just wondering... why were the mayors gender-swapped?”

“What?”

“The, the Night Vale mayor is a woman but the Desert Bluffs mayor is a man, and I was just wondering why they were the opposite genders when everyone else’s counterpart seemed to be the same gender.”

Oh. He was asking about the sandstorm.

Carlos had really enjoyed his subversive digs at Desert Bluffs, the way he’d been able to translate his unease with the cheerful demeanor he’d been told to have the software project, the little story he’d come up with that made Desert Bluffs seem terrifying and horrid at every corner.

He’d tried to forget, as he worked, that people would listen to everything he exported. Shutting that fear, that paranoia, out of his mind, was the only way he could manage to get anything done. (After he’d gotten everything finished and sent the requisite pieces to Al, he had worried a little about whether Julie would bring up the stuff about Steve. And she did, asking “Are you moving towards forgiving him or did you just really hate that one voice?”)

Since his usual depiction of Night Vale was terrifying and horrid in its own way, he figured the negative stuff about Desert Bluffs wouldn’t really catch anyone’s attention. He also didn’t think anyone would look too closely at the plot.

He’d been doing this for the better part of a year now, and he’d never paid that much attention to logic or plot structure in the past. It was fun to tie things together, but he didn’t see it as all that important. So, when he wrote about the sandstorm that afflicted both Night Vale and Desert Bluffs and all the similarities between the two cities, he hadn’t really thought everything through clearly. Some things didn’t make a lot of sense. Carlos thought it didn’t really matter.

His coworkers, evidently, thought otherwise.

He’d been bombarded with questions. Some, he had answers for. He knew why Kevin’s report didn’t quite match up with Cecil’s. He knew why Larry Leroy’s senses were transferred to Lawrence Levine. But he didn’t know why Cecil and Kevin seemed to be each others’ doubles, while Dana and Vanessa each seemed to have their own doubles. He didn’t know why Steve Carlsberg only seemed to exist in one city without any counterpart to speak of. (Other than that he didn’t want to imagine more than one Steve Carlsberg existing in this world.)

“I don’t know,” he told Evan. “Maybe gender is irrelevant to the counterpart phenomenon. There’s not a large sample size to do analysis on. It could just be a coincidence that the other counterparts are of the same gender.”

Evan seemed satisfied with that, which was a relief. Some of his coworkers had offered their own explanations for questions he hadn’t been able to completely answer, and then he’d gotten worked up over trying to fit their personal visions of the sandstorm into the way he’d thought about it, and getting further worked up because they were wasting time talking about Carlos’ stupid little self-entertainment that was dressed up as work.

Thankfully, Evan wasn’t here to do that, so Carlos could return to… more stupid self-entertainment dressed up as work.

It really did sound like poetry, that strange transcript spoken by Cecil’s voice. In fact, a lot of the transcripts sounded like poetry. They seemed almost deliberately strange and beautiful. Carlos entered more of them into Cecil’s input field, and listened to elegantly weird phrases tumble out of his headphones.

He couldn’t help trying to figure out the original content that had been warped into these unintelligible “poems.” One of them mentioned hooded figures, so he wondered if Harry had been feeding some of Cecil’s audio to the dictation software, giving them an eccentric feedback loop. Or it could have been a coincidence. It could be that the dictation software had transcribed some completely different phrase as “hooded figures.” Carlos would have to wait until Harry got back to find out.

After an hour or so of playing around with the transcripts, Carlos felt like maybe he should get some “real” work done. There was nothing specifically needed (Al was probably still busy handling stuff from that big demo last week) so he went back to the old standbys. He wanted to try improving Cecil’s responsiveness to punctuation marks, and testing names was always a good idea. The field automatically supplied the recently-used “Dana” after he’d typed “Intern,” and he was just about to replace the name with a new one when he was interrupted.

“Excuse me?” A woman Carlos didn’t recognize was just outside his cubicle entrance. “Are you the guy who does those fake news show things?”

Carlos nodded.

“Oh, great. I have a question. Well, more, I have this thought, and I wanted to find out what you think about it? Because I was wondering, well, speculating, I guess, about how Kevin likes Steve Carlsberg even though Cecil hates him, and I thought, maybe Kevin’s in love with Steve and hates Carlos, like the opposite of Cecil. Does that make any sense?”

Carlos sighed, mentally preparing his answer. People who didn’t even know him were interrupting his working hours with these sorts of inane questions, because every time he exported any audio it seemingly made its way throughout the entire company. Something would have to be done.


	21. A Memory of Europe

Cecil couldn’t pronounce the names of countries.

Not every country gave him… _it_ … a problem, but a surprising number did. Most of the mispronunciations were minor, but a few were so badly mangled as to be unrecognizable. It was odd, how Cecil could say just about anything Carlos threw at him… at _it_ …

All the obscure words and complicated names that Carlos could think of, Cecil could handle just fine. It really was an extraordinary achievement. Whatever company reorganization had resulted in the project’s initial abandonment was a damn crime.

But somehow, even though Cecil could pronounce “Hiram McDaniels” with ease, “France” became… well, something that sounded like “Franchia,” but of course Carlos didn’t know how it should be spelled because the transcript just said “France.”

So Carlos had to go through a list of nearly 200 countries and take note of which ones Cecil pronounced incorrectly. This involved looking up pronunciation guides for a few of the more obscure ones. Whether Cecil said “Laos” correctly was something of a judgement call.

Most of the mispronunciations were subtle, understandable. “Spain” came out sounding like “Spa-een.” Jamaica had a similar problem. And “Uzbekistan” came out sounding only slightly odd, probably better than some Americans would be able to manage.

But then there were the ones that sounded _nothing_ like their spelling suggested. France was one. Latvia was another, this one coming out even more strange than “Franchia.” Carlos could only approximate it as “Luftnarp.” Switzerland was truncated to a single syllable, and Carlos swore he heard a “v” where the “w” belonged.

Out of all the mispronounced countries, those three gave Carlos pause. To be _so_ far removed from the expected phonetic makeup of the word… and for these to all be _countries,_ when no other words had exhibited this problem… it indicated something more severe than a simple issue with parsing phonemes. Carlos _could_ manually override the incorrect pronunciations with new “special case” instructions for the words in question, but that kind of fix wasted memory, and it failed to address the underlying issue, which meant it may still be causing other problems that had not yet been identified.

On the other hand, finding where the issue lay buried in Cecil’s code was a daunting task. Carlos didn’t even know where to begin. For a start, just getting his bearings, he tried typing in his approximations for how Cecil pronounced those country names. When fed the words “Franchia,” “Luftnarp,” and “Svitz,” Cecil sounded almost exactly the same as when it tried to say “France,” “Latvia,” and “Switzerland.”

Now that Carlos had this information, he didn’t see how it could help him.

Carlos imagined, for a moment, that he had been transported to a reality where those countries really were pronounced that way. No, even better, a world where there was no France or Switzerland or Latvia, where Europe contained an entirely alien set of countries. He started imagining the countries of Svitz and Franchia and Luftnarp, figuring out how they might fit into a political geography vastly different from the one Carlos knew.

“Svitz, of course, land of rolling hills and off-key tones heard on the breeze,” Carlos wrote.

And when Cecil said it, it sounded convincing. Carlos could, almost, for a moment, believe that Svitz was a real place. Perhaps it was, in the strange world full of hooded figures and angels that Cecil inhabited. Perhaps Cecil had even been there.

Cecil could speak with experience about Svitz. And why not Franchia and Luftnarp as well? It would be a crime not to explore the novel cultural experiences that these countries had to offer. They could be entirely different from any known land.

“Franchia, land of arches.” Carlos liked the idea that some parts of this hypothetical Europe were entirely uninhabited, that a place could consist solely of architecture, with no known origin or purpose. “To see a culture that doesn’t even have any people, a country with no population — just ancient stone arches, hundreds of square miles of arches, intertwining and leaning against each other.”

Carlos was just putting the finishing touches on his description of Luftnarp and its gray-skinned, gaping-mouthed locals when Al contacted him.

_Carlos,_

_Thanks for sending me the list of the country names with issues. Let me know when you have an idea of what needs to be done. Obviously a complete solution is preferable, but if it’s beyond your ability to achieve without additional resources then maybe just that redirect thing you mentioned would be sufficient for the meantime._

_Al_

A wave of guilt passed through Carlos. He was supposed to be fixing the bug, or at the very least studying it, and he’d gotten distracted by writing about fictional European countries. This kind of thing was why his infatuation with Cecil had gotten out of hand. He wasn’t even providing an adequate demonstration of the bug, since he was typing out the approximate spellings for Cecil’s pronunciations instead of putting in the real country names.

With a few replacements, Carlos was able to at least pretend he’d sort of been doing something useful. Cecil could still be heard to say “No one I talked to knew where the country of Svitz was” even when the transcript read “Switzerland.”

“So visit France, but, you know, watch out for the monster that I may or may not have only imagined” felt like a far different sentence to what Carlos had initially written, despite sounding exactly the same. Talk about cognitive dissonance.

Subbing in “Latvia” for “Luftnarp” actually made Carlos uncomfortable. It was one thing to have written strange or nonsensical things about Switzerland, where Carlos had never visited, but Carlos had actually spent time in Latvia. He’d spent time in France, too, but only a couple of days, and most of that had been in trains and buses, so he didn’t remember much of France itself. Not nearly as well as he remembered Latvia.

Of course, it was less Latvia that had made an impression on Carlos, and more the local boy that he’d taken up with during his time there. He’d wound up staying a full week longer than he’d originally planned, just so he could spend more time with Andris. It was a time in his life when schedules were less immutable, travel plans more optional, and meeting new people entirely easier.

Not that meeting people had ever really been easy for Carlos. But he’d been young and unattached, and being in an unfamiliar place actually helped. Knowing that he could take off the next day and never see any of those people again had really mitigated the fear that he would embarrass himself and have to deal with the consequences.

Looking back, Carlos wondered if Andris had felt something complementary, a sort of freedom to act around Carlos, a stranger, that he didn’t necessarily have about his compatriots. It hadn’t occurred to Carlos to ask at the time, and he probably couldn’t have communicated the question to Andris if he’d thought of it. They’d barely had a few words in common. Most of their time together had not been spent speaking.

Actually, the language barrier had probably worked in Carlos’ favor. It wasn’t until years later that he’d gotten the hang of introducing himself to strangers. Back then his default conversation had gone “So, what do you study?” “Computer Science.” “Oh, you must be really smart!” And then Carlos would mumble over some sort of faux-humble denial of his intelligence, because there is literally _no response_ to “You must be really smart!” that makes one sound simultaneously intelligent _and_ humble _and_ alluring.

Carlos missed those days. It was odd, this nostalgia for a time when he was definitely not as capable or as competent as he was now. But he’d felt so happy, then. Been so free. He wasn’t yet confined to a single building for nine hours on most days. He hadn’t known what his future would hold, and, theoretically, it could have held _anything._

Andris could even have been a part of it, though that was an unlikely thought. Carlos and Andris had hardly known each other. Even if Carlos could have stayed in Latvia, it’s unlikely their relationship would have lasted. Probably neither one of them would have acted as bravely as they did, if they’d expected to know one another for long.

Still, Carlos wished that he could go back and try things differently. Handle relationships better. Avoid confrontations that he’d later discovered were unnecessary. Even go back just a couple of months and stay out of that stupid intervention that had ruined everything.

He missed working on Cecil without the and the guilt and the paranoia. When everything was just fun and games and a harmless ridiculous crush that no one else had any reason to know about. He’d almost forgotten what it was like, just playing around, making Cecil say ridiculous things without worrying about others hearing. He’d had all these fun little standbys, recurring characters like Old Woman Josie and the angels, the underground city plot… it had been _ages_ since he’d written anything about the underground city.

_The future is what you make of it,_ Carlos thought. He’d made Kevin say that, when they were gearing up for that big demonstration. (Al still hadn’t given Carlos any information about how that had gone.) But it still applied. Carlos couldn’t let his eavesdropping coworkers ruin all of his fun.

In fact, he could very well have some fun at their expense. He typed out a secret message, hoping that it would inspire one or two people to give paranoid looks over their shoulder. He arranged Cecil’s settings for “serious and urgent,” before having it read out the message. “Silverhawk, Copperhead, and the Gopher: Activate. I repeat, activate. Execute Mission Alpha November Zulu Zero One Three. Lethal parameters acceptable.” Part of Carlos wondered if he wasn’t going too far with that last sentence, but if someone actually took it seriously then it was really their own fault, both for listening in the first place and for not being able to identify jokes.

Maybe Carlos wasn’t tracking down the bug like he was supposed to, but he was having _fun_ for the first time in at least a month, and he felt like he deserved it.

It took close to a week figure out what the issue was. Cecil would interpret a country name correctly, but then add an extra step and try to pronounce the word as spelled but _according to the linguistic rules of that country’s language._ Since Carlos was only fluent in English, as he’d explained to Al, Cecil’s ability to speak in other languages was still mostly untested and clearly unreliable. Carlos went ahead and disabled multi-lingual support, so that Cecil would stick to English pronunciations. When/if Al got around to providing him a translation staff, Carlos could make the switch back. For the meantime, at least he got Cecil to say “France” without adding extra syllables.


	22. The Whispering Forest

“Gain insight into your subconscious! Unlock the **secret meanings** behind your dreams! Our **expert analysis** has helped customers with:

-Depression  
-Difficulties sleeping  
-Childhood trauma  
-Anger issues  
-And more!

Plus, it’s **completely free!** ”

The ad was using obvious hyperbole, and Carlos doubted a Facebook dream journal would actually solve any of his problems, but it was there, it was something to do, and unlike professional psychotherapy, it was something he could actually afford. He went ahead and added the app to his account. Of course it automatically posted to his timeline. He should have disabled notifications. At least he noticed right away, and he turned off the “post automatically” setting so he could avoid unwittingly spamming his friends’ newsfeeds.

There was no point in journaling any dreams just then. It was late afternoon, Carlos had just got home from work, and whatever dreams he may have had the previous night were forgotten. He thought that maybe he’d dreamed about eating an apple, but he suspected he’d just been sleep-remembering an apple he’d eaten at lunch. Either way, he didn’t think there was much symbolism in it.

He’d just have to try to pay attention the next time he slept, see if by making an effort he could remember his dreams well enough to write them down the next day.

\---

At work the next morning, Carlos finally broke down and asked Al how the presentation to Desert Bluffs had gone. He’d been waiting patiently, trying to see how long it would take for Al to tell him without prompting, but it had been well over a month and Carlos was beginning to doubt that Al would ever get around to it. Maybe he’d forgotten. He always seemed to have a lot on his plate.

Or maybe (as Carlos feared) the presentation had been a disaster, and Al had been trying to protect Carlos’ feelings. Al replied uncharacteristically quickly, and Carlos opened the email with an uncharacteristic amount of dread.

_Carlos,_

_The presentation was great. I actually had trouble convincing them that the voices were entirely computer generated -- they thought we were using actors! It took inputting a few suggested sentences on the spot and hearing the audio right then to convince them that we weren’t up to some trick. I wish I’d had you there, actually -- you’re better at manipulating the software than I am; I bet you could have_ really _impressed them._

_Anyway, still no clear word on whether they’re going to use the software. Some stuff is going on with Strex and some corporate reorganization and I guess they’re waiting until after that’s all died down to make any decisions. Which would’ve been great to know_ before _we went all-out doing a presentation for them, but what can you do._

_Keep up the good work._

_Al_

That was reassuring, if a bit perplexing. Carlos couldn’t fathom why Desert Bluffs would bother attending a presentation for something they weren’t ready to make a decision about. And if Al had wanted Carlos to be at the presentation, then why hadn’t Al, y’know, _asked Carlos to be at the presentation?_ Carlos would have hated it, what with the pressure of public speaking, but it’s not like he’d been working on anything vital at that time. He could have been there.

It was amusing to think about hiring actors to portray Cecil and Kevin. Carlos wouldn’t even know how to write for actors. With the software, he could just tweak settings in order to change the emotional state or other aspects of the voice. If there were actors, he’d have to provide stage directions of some sort.

Cecil could accurately mimic all kinds of emotional states without any stage directions at all. In fact, Carlos hardly even had to adjust the settings anymore. The program had become so responsive that it almost seemed to intuitively grasp the nuances and subtleties of the text that Carlos fed it. There were times when he idly speculated on the possibility of emergent intelligence. If “idle speculation” were actually code for “wishful thinking.”

Carlos was good that day. He didn’t log onto Facebook at all while he was at work, or have Cecil say his name _or_ complain about Steve even once.

When he did pull up Facebook, after getting home and eating and sitting down with his own computer, he saw the dream journal’s post on his timeline. Right. He’d wanted to start writing in it that day.

He tried to remember, to think back to what he’d been thinking about when he woke up that morning. He was fairly certain there’d been a horse. He’d probably been riding it. Yes, he’d definitely been riding a horse in his dream.

There’d been someone else on the horse, maybe. Someone that Carlos had to rescue, or perhaps someone who’d rescued him. There’d been some sort of horseback rescue going on, but who was doing the rescuing was an open question.

Clearly, waiting until he had a free moment to write in his dream journal wasn’t working out very well. By the time he got online after work, too much time had passed to remember everything. Or even much of anything.

While he was thinking about it, Carlos put a notebook and a pencil next to his bed so that he could jot down notes as soon as he woke up. Hopefully that way he would actually have something for the online journal tomorrow.

In the meantime, Carlos considered just going another day without making a journal entry, but he decided that he’d rather set the precedent of writing something in it every night, even if it was something pointlessly vague.

_I don’t remember it very clearly, but I know I was riding a horse. There was someone else there. I don’t know if it was a man or a woman; I think maybe I never saw him or her clearly, or maybe I just forgot. The other person might have rescued me and pulled me onto the horse or maybe I was the one doing the rescuing; I’m not sure._

**Dream logged!** announced the app. **Share with friends?**

Carlos clicked “No.”

**Analyze?** asked the app.

While he didn’t think there’d be much to go on, he figured he’d see what kind of analysis the app did. He wondered vaguely if it would just say something like “inconclusive” because he was giving it so little data.

The app did not say “inconclusive.” It said:

“ **3** symbols have been identified in your dream!

**Remember:** Was the memory a happy one, or a sad one? Were you doing the remembering, or was someone else remembering something and telling you? Oftentimes we remember things in dreams because we think that those moments from the past hold some significance. Folklore holds that dreams about memories are actually predictive of future events.

**Horse:** Horses represent pride, or even selfishness. If the horse had a rider, that person may be arrogant, perhaps an antagonist to the dreamer. Historically, horses in dreams were thought to be ill omens, to the extent that the dreamer was often considered to have summoned bad luck by communing with a horse through their dreams.

**Man:** People who appear in dreams tend to be reflections or aspects of the dreamer. A man may reflect some quality that the dreamer views in themselves. What qualities did the man possess? Was he someone familiar to you? Consider your reaction to the man, and imagine that you are viewing yourself as you viewed him.”

The app was useless. Carlos had thought, had hoped, that there’d be some sort of a text parser, something with a sense of grammar that would actually interpret the sentences entered into it, something that could search surrounding words for context before ascribing meaning to a particular word. But no, this thing just looked for keywords and spat out associations from a database.

Its choice of keywords was suspect, too. Carlos would expect “rescue” to be at least as notable as “remember.” And it was odd that “man” triggered a response but “woman” pulled up nothing. Women in dreams probably held just as much meaning as men did. The dream analysis felt like it came from some bygone era where women weren’t viewed as people.

Carlos could probably code a better dream analysis app in his spare time, set it up on Facebook and act as a rival and eventual replacement to the one that was already there. Instead he settled for just removing the stupid thing from his account.

The troubling thing was, Carlos had really started to get into the idea of keeping a dream journal. Even if his dreams didn’t provide major psychological insights, they still might be fun or interesting to think about. He thought it could be nice to pay a little more attention to them.

But there was no need to dwell on that. The dream journal was gone, although Facebook did show Carlos an ad for horseback riding lessons, which meant the app had already turned over his input to the advertising algorithms. Yeah, the people who’d made that thing were scum.

\---

_May 01, 2013_

_Last night I dreamed that I was walking in a forest. There was a voice talking to me. At first I thought it was one of the trees talking to me, but I kept hearing it no matter how far I walked. I knew that one tree couldn’t stretch that far, so there had to be more than one tree with the ability to talk. There were other people in the forest, too, but when I tried to walk toward them, they always disappeared before I could reach them. Eventually I realized they were turning into trees. If I watched carefully, I could see it happen. Their skin got all grey and flaky and their legs turned into roots and started digging into the ground and leaves would sprout from their heads and their hands. I watched one transformation completely. The person seemed happy. They all seemed happy, like they were joining a community by becoming trees. The voices, I thought, were all the people who’d already become trees trying to welcome their new friends. I kind of wanted to become a tree too, but I remembered that there’s a new episode of Game of Thrones on Sunday, and I decided to leave. I think maybe I was going to go watch Game of Thrones right then, even though it’s not Sunday yet._

_As I left, I listened to what the forest was saying to me. I might have already listened to it, and was just hearing some more at this point; it’s kind of hard to keep track of the sequence of events. The forest was saying all sorts of compliments about me. It said my hair was nice, and I was wearing a nice shirt that complimented the color of my eyes. In the dream, I’d dyed my hair to hide the grey in it, and at first I thought that the forest only liked my hair because of the dye, but then I realized that the dye had faded at least a week before, because I’d put it in three weeks ago and it only had a half-life of four days. (I don’t know where the idea that hair dyes have half-lives came from.) I was close to the edge of the forest, and I wanted to say “thank you” so I turned around to say that before I left. That’s when I saw the person who was speaking. It was Cecil. I don’t know how I knew it was Cecil. I don’t have any idea of what Cecil looks like, and I don’t even really remember what he looked like in the dream, but I knew that it was definitely Cecil. And I realized, all of a sudden, that this forest was one that I had made, out of compliments that I’d written that had come out of Cecil’s mouth._

_I said, “It’s all empty.”_

_Cecil said, “I love you Carlos.”_

_Then I ran away, but I was running backwards, because I couldn’t bear the thought of looking away from Cecil. Even though I knew it was all a lie, all “empty,” I still didn’t want to stop looking at this person who loved me. No matter how far I ran, though, there were still more trees, even though I thought I’d been right at the edge of the forest. I just never seemed to get out of it. Right at the end of the dream I looked straight into Cecil’s eyes and I saw that they were black. That’s when I woke up._

_Oh, I also dreamed that I was throwing a party, and someone asked me why I was having a party and I said “Because I’m single!” In two days it’ll be the anniversary of things ending between me and Steve, so I think I know what that’s about. At least my subconscious seems to be happy about it._

Carlos had woken up early. Usually when that happened he just went back to sleep, but he did _not_ want to forget that dream before he wrote it down. It was so vivid, and so surreal, even by dream standards. He still felt groggy as he scribbled in the notebook he was now thankful he’d put next to his bed.

Unfortunately, it took longer to get everything down than he’d hoped, and by the time he was done, there were barely a few minutes left before he needed to get ready for work. Still feeling somewhat vague and unsteady, Carlos logged into Facebook. It was his one of his default actions, and besides, he could see if the dream journal app had anything to say about that night’s bizarre adventure.

By the time he was at the Facebook homepage, Carlos was awake enough to remember that he’d removed the app because it was horrible, so there wasn’t much of a point in being on Facebook right then. He only had a couple of minutes to spare, anyway.

That’s when he saw a notification from a different app.

It was a calendar notice, and it was telling him to clean his apartment. “Don’t make other plans. Don’t reschedule this event. Just do it, already.”

He’d set that notification at least a month before, at some point when May First had seemed like a beautifully distant and unreachable date. If he’d seen it when he got home… well, it would still have been annoying, but at least he could have started cleaning. First thing in the morning, he couldn’t act on it, so the best he could do was try to keep it in mind all day while he was at work.

Carlos turned off his monitor with the notification still open so that he’d see it first thing that afternoon when he turned the monitor on. That way he wouldn’t be able to forget about it and leave his apartment as the complete mess it had become.

On the way out to his car, he dropped a couple of empty water bottles in the building’s recycling bin. It was small, as head starts on cleaning go, but Carlos felt good about it. He actually felt good about a lot of things. Somehow, that forest in his dream had really improved his outlook. The knowledge that it was all false didn’t derail the sense of confidence he gained from the unconditional praise. Funny how that worked.


	23. Eternal Scouts

“Harry, I’m telling you, it was working _fine_ before it was harnessed to your project.”

“Correlation does not imply causation, Carlos.”

The two programmers were standing just outside their cubicle entrances. Maintenance had insisted that connecting the two cubicles to make it easier to work together was out of the question, so anytime they wanted to discuss anything they either had to shout or get out of their chairs. Or, as they were doing now, both.

“Well I’m trying really hard to find something else that could be responsible, and there’s _nothing._ ”

“The problem has to be on your end. The dictation software is working exactly the way it’s supposed to.”

Carlos didn’t bother answering this statement, settling for a simple judgemental glare.

Harry sighed. “Okay, so its word recognition algorithm requires some fine tuning. A lot of fine tuning. But… it’s not doing anything to the speech synth’s algorithms. I’ve checked. All it’s doing is inputting text. There’s no reason I can find for the pronunciations to be coming out garbled.”

“And yet they are.”

“They’re probably just things you didn’t notice until now. I know you haven’t tested every possible string of words and-”

“I can play you audio of Ce… spee… of the speech synth pronouncing the word ‘pizza’ _completely correctly._ I have the exports. Something changed.”

“And I’ve checked every possible way the dictation software could be interfering and I-”

“Check it again.” Carlos cut Harry off a second time.

“You don’t get to tell me how to do my job!”

“Well if you just did your job right I wouldn’t have to!”

“I’ve been ignoring _every other_ application of my software to focus on debugging _your_ project. Right now you’re _keeping me_ from doing my job.”

“All I want you to do is clean up the mess you made.”

_“I did not break your boyfriend, Carlos.”_

There was silence. Carlos looked down, avoiding Harry’s gaze. “I’ve… been trying really hard not to anthropomorphize it.”

Harry took a moment to respond. “I know. I’m sorry. That was uncalled for.”

“Yeah. It was.”

Carlos felt Harry’s hand on his shoulder, just for a moment, before it drew away. He looked up again.

“I’ll go take another look at it, okay?” Said Harry, disappearing back in his cubicle.

“I’d appreciate it.” Carlos went back to his own desk, hearing Harry begin to type and click through his completely disorganized code. Sounds of furious typing and other movements began to reach him from elsewhere in the office, reminding him just how quiet things had been moments before. Everyone had heard the argument. Worse, everyone had been listening to the argument, to the extent that all other activity had halted by the time Harry spat out that biting remark.

Sure, Carlos had made some mistakes, but he was _trying._ Listening to Cecil every day, hearing that mellifluous voice, but refusing to indulge, could be hell. Especially when his coworkers took his repressed fantasy and threw it in his face.

Plus he was on edge because of all the bugs that had popped up in the past three weeks. Ever since he and Harry had got their two projects to work together, Carlos just kept finding words that Cecil couldn’t pronounce. Some of them were words Cecil had said many times before, like “pizza” or “Khoshekh.”

For a while, Carlos had simply made note of the problems and worked around them. Combining Cecil with the dictation software was bound to cause a few issues, and he and Harry would just have to collaborate and work out the kinks. But Carlos had grown impatient, tired of avoiding certain words, and neither he nor Harry had uncovered any indication of what was causing all this trouble.

Since the dictation software was Harry’s project, Carlos thought that Harry should be able to track down problems in its code. Carlos was looking, too, but he wasn’t as familiar with the software so he didn’t have a clear idea of what it was supposed to look like. Of course, Harry was similarly disadvantaged when it came to sussing out what the speech synth’s code was supposed to look like, but still. Harry’s code had precipitated this mess, and that meant it was Harry’s responsibility to fix it.

There was no way Cecil was to blame for these problems. He was the victim here. It. _It_ was the victim here.

No, calling Cecil a victim was still too humanizing.

Carlos sighed. Harry’s comment wouldn’t have bothered him so much if it hadn’t been _right._ He still thought of Cecil as… well, not necessarily as a _boyfriend,_ he usually didn’t let those fantasies get too far, but definitely as a _person._ And he needed to stop that, because right now he had to look at Cecil and see _software._ Otherwise there was no way he’d be able to do a proper debugging.

He scanned through the change log yet again. Infuriatingly, it looked like Harry was correct. They’d kept the interactions between the two programs down to a minimum. The dictation software would input text, Cecil would output audio. It _should_ have been working. None of the protocol for Cecil’s pronunciations had been altered.

Carlos expanded his search.

\---

“Harry?”

“Yeah?”

“I owe you an apology.”

Harry turned around in his desk chair. “Yeah?” He said again.

“Yeah,” Carlos repeated. “I found the source of the problem. I mean, I think I did. It’ll be a few minutes before I know for sure. But… you were right. It wasn’t the dictation software. Something else was wrong.”

“What was it?”

Carlos took a breath, trying to think about how best to explain what he’d figured out. “Well, the speech synth is supposed to be able to handle multiple languages, but I guess there wasn’t the manpower or the expertise to implement the full library of contextual rules for all languages, so if you try to actually use it to say something in another language, the results tend to be sketchy.

“And that was causing some problems a while ago, so I just turned off multi-lingual support, and it interpreted everything through English rules and that was working fine. Except it wasn’t really, because English has all these foreign words and we don’t _think_ of them as foreign but we pronounce them according to another language’s rules, like “pizza” which doesn’t obey standard English pronunciation guidelines. And it turns out that the speech synth uses what few rules for foreign languages it has in order to pronounce these words and I should have figured it out earlier but I was so convinced it was the dictation software because I didn’t notice anything wrong until after we linked the two.”

Harry looked appraisingly at Carlos as he listened. After Carlos had finished, he said, “So. Not my fault.”

Carlos shook his head. “Not your fault.”

“Okay,” said Harry. “Good.” He began to turn back to his computer, but Carlos spoke again.

“I’m sorry for the way I freaked out on you earlier.”

Harry smiled. “It’s okay. We all get protective of our projects.”

“I just… I took it way too far. There’s no need for me to be offended on behalf of software. You didn’t deserve that.”

“Don’t worry about it. Just, next time you start to get worked up over that speech synth program… maybe try to remember this conversation?”

Carlos nodded. “I can do that.”

He returned to his own desk. Cecil… the speech synth software… still needed time to process his updates before he could use it again, so in the meantime he didn’t feel guilty about messing around on Facebook.

Sometime recently, Facebook had started showing him ads targeted at people dealing with depression. Carlos couldn’t help but wonder what had given him away. Somehow, Facebook thinking he was depressed did more to convince him that it was true than Julie or anyone else suggesting it to him.

As was often the case, two unrelated ads were stacked on top of one another. However, they used similar fonts, and the result looked an awful lot like one ad reading “Depressed? Visit Six Flags!”

For a moment, Carlos actually thought that it was one ad, which presented Six Flags as a fun place to go to get your mind off your troubles. It took a moment to notice the disconnect where the two ads met. Once he did, he felt foolish for thinking that Six Flags had been marketing itself to depressed people. That didn’t fit the Six Flags brand at all. No one wants to go to an amusement park where most of the other visitors are suffering from depression.

A notification appeared letting Carlos know that his changes had been processed. Cecil was ready for testing again.

Carlos opened the list of identified problem words, copied a section of it, and fed it to Cecil. They all sounded perfectly fine. Which meant that Carlos had solved the problem. Which just confirmed that Harry had been right all along.

Carlos vaguely wished that he would just drop dead right then and not have to face Harry again or admit how things had worked out. Not quite as much as he’d wished he could drop dead while he’d been talking to Harry the first time that day, but still. A convenient hole never opens up and swallows you when you want it to, and simply wishing for death doesn’t bring it about.

“Harry, Carlos would like me to offer you his most sincere apologies for his behavior earlier today. As you can tell, I am now functioning normally and can again say ‘pizza’ without trouble. Carlos deeply regrets his accusations, but listen. Regret is an attempt to avoid what has already happened. It is as useless as attempting to turn toast back into bread. Carlos fears that you may not forgive him. I cannot condone Carlos’ feelings any more than I can explain his actions, but I trust that you will regard him with compassion.”

Carlos deleted most of what he’d just typed out. Writing an apology was difficult. He didn’t want to get too personal, but he wanted it to apply to the issue at hand. He kept writing and deleting until he wound up with a series of aphorisms that didn’t sound remotely like part of an apology. Every time he mentioned Harry or their argument, it just felt… ill-suited. Eventually, he considered that Harry probably wouldn’t even be appreciative of an apology issued by Cecil. Harry probably didn’t like listening to Cecil as much as Carlos did.

When Carlos remembered that any audio he exported would likely be heard by just about everyone in the company (he still hadn’t come up with a way to stop Gil from distributing his files), that cinched it. He left what he’d written and resolved to make things up to Harry in some other way.

Of course, the _best_ way to make things up to Harry would be to stop being so obsessed with Cecil. But two months of earnest efforts to forget about the alluring voice in his computer had come to nil, and Carlos was having trouble coming up with new ideas.

“Goodbye, Cecil,” he whispered. Nothing stirred within him, no sadness or sense of loss. If he were going to let go of Cecil he would have to shout it from the rooftop, not speak softly so that his coworkers wouldn’t be able to tell what he was doing. Besides, he didn’t believe himself. His own voice just wasn’t very convincing.

Cecil could be convincing. Far more convincing than Carlos. If Carlos had Cecil report that they had said their farewells… perhaps then he would believe that it meant something.

“‘We could have had something, Cecil. Always remember that.’ Carlos looked at me for a moment, clutching my arm before walking, head bowed, out of the studio. I could see the regret in his eyes.”

After listening, Carlos deleted his name and went to some effort to make sure that piece of dialog didn’t sound like it had anything to do with him. But he needed to export it. He needed it to be heard.

“‘We could have had something, Cecil.’” Carlos played that over and over, trying to strengthen his resolve the only way he knew how. He _had_ to let go of his emotional attachment to this piece of software.

By the end of the day, he almost believed it was possible.


	24. The Mayor

Cecil, Carlos had recently discovered, had an echo function.

The echo function, Carlos had discovered shortly after, had some serious bugs.

In short bursts it worked fine. But if used for very long, it would start cutting out.

Worse, it would cut out _inconsistently._ Repeated phrases would maintain the echo, while any other phrases would sound completely normal. At least at first.

“...If you’re concerned about what those costs are, then you are not in enough trouble for the brown stone s p i r e. You just need a lawyer.”

Eventually, the repeated phrase would also start to lose the echo. And, if allowed to run with the setting on for much longer…

“The b rown s tone s p i re has a slogan. Itcannotbepronounced.”

Other phrases would start to sound constricted and run together.

So not only would the echo function only work properly for short phrases, it could also garble everything else if the user didn’t turn it off. No wonder that function had been buried deep in the options inventory with no obvious means to activate it.

Carlos would have to do something about this, but precisely _what_ he was going to do about it was an open question. Removing the function entirely could be difficult and time consuming, though not as much so as getting it to work correctly. Keeping it buried and inaccessible, though, left code hanging around in the program doing nothing, and Carlos hated to have unnecessary code in his projects.

“Hey, Carlos?”

Carlos’ thoughts were interrupted as Harry poked his head into the cubicle. “Yeah?” He asked.

“We should probably be leaving now if we’re gonna make it to Al’s retirement party.”

Checking the clock, Carlos realized this was correct. “Shit. You’re right. Sorry. Just… I need to log out…” He hurriedly hit ctrl+s, and then attempted to close the program, which chose that moment to become unresponsive. “Ugh, close, damn you!”

Harry chuckled. “Don’t worry, we’ve got a couple minutes. I mean, unless there’s something you’re embarrassed about other people seeing, in which case you should totally panic and yell at your computer.”

“It’s not that. It’s just… I don’t even know if my save went through, or-”

“Carlos. I was joking. Relax.”

Carlos took a deep breath. “Okay. I’m sorry. I’ll… I guess this is gonna take a minute.”

The minute transpired, and Carlos lost patience and forcibly shut down the computer. It wasn’t like he’d been doing anything significant since his last save, anyway.

In the car, Harry asked, “So, do you have any idea why Al’s retiring?”

“Presumably for the same reason most people retire.” Carlos replied, keeping his eyes on the road.

“But he announced it so suddenly. There are all these rumors that something else is going on. Like something forced his hand.”

“Really?” Asked Carlos. “What kind of rumors?”

“Well, the nicest ones are saying he’s got cancer or something and he wants to enjoy life before he’s too sick to do much.”

“Those are the _nice_ ones?”

“The mean ones imply he’s taking retirement as an alternative to getting fired. ‘Cause he’s stealing office supplies, or embezzling, or harassing employees…”

“Harassing people? _Al?”_

Harry shrugged. “That’s what some people are saying.”

“I don’t buy it. You can hardly blame the guy for wanting out of here. Remember what happened to Paul?”

“That was all Marcus Vansten’s fault,” Harry pointed out.

“You really think Vansten can’t still cause problems?”

Harry sighed. “I don’t know. But I think he might be a little more wary of Night Vale after those clips of yours got out. It seemed like that really got to him.”

Carlos didn’t really know how to respond to that. “Good,” he said. “I guess.”

For all that it got him an extra hour off for lunch, Carlos felt like the retirement party went by too quickly to make sense of anything. The carpools got to the restaurant, everyone found seats, they ate lunch, Al made a speech, there was cake… All of these things happened in a sort of blur. Carlos tried to examine Al’s speech for any hints as to some hidden underlying cause for his retirement, but nothing stood out to him at the time. Looking back, he could barely remember the speech at all.

Harry was right in one respect. It was all happening surprisingly fast.

Al had made the announcement, what, two weeks ago? Less? The party had certainly been organized in a short amount of time; just a week prior Carlos had been part of the arguments over which restaurant they should book. And in a few more hours, Al would be gone, forever.

“Maybe he’s been offered a position in the secret World Government,” Carlos suggested on the drive back to work.

Harry looked at him incredulously. “You don’t _actually_ believe in all that conspiracy theory crap, do you?”

“No, no. Of course not. I’m just seeding false conspiracies so that the real ones will go unnoticed.”

“O-kaaaay,” said Harry.

The rest of the drive passed in near-silence. While they walked through the Night Vale parking lot, Harry commented, “Sometimes, I don’t quite know what to make of you.”

“Yeah,” said Carlos, “I kind of get that a lot.”

Carlos and Harry each disappeared into their own cubicles. While Carlos’ computer woke up, he tried to remember what he’d last been doing. Some minor issue that would take too much work to fix, he remembered.

_Error: Unable to log on. Try again or contact IT for assistance._

Carlos entered his login information several times, checked to be sure caps lock wasn’t on, and restarted the computer. Still, the same message.

Reluctantly, Carlos reached for the phone at his desk and called IT. He got Gil, who tried resetting his password with no success before agreeing to come check out the problem in person. Not exactly something to look forward to, but Carlos was rather out of options.

“Hey, Carlos?”

For the second time that day, Harry showed up at the entrance to Carlos’ cubicle.

“Yeah?”

“Can you log on to your computer?”

Carlos paused. “You’re locked out too?” He said.

“Okay, so it’s not just me.” Said Harry.

“Not just you. I just called IT. Gil’s supposed to be here soon to do something about it.”

As if summoned, Gil came into view just as Carlos finished speaking.

“Oh good, you’re here,” said Carlos. “Apparently Harry’s having trouble as well.”

“Everyone’s having trouble,” said Gil. “It’s not just you two, it’s the whole damn network. It’s not kicking people off, but once they’ve logged out no one’s getting back on. Apparently there’s an update to the OS that’s being rolled out across the system. I don’t know why nobody told us about it, but hey, why let IT know that no one’s gonna be able to use their computers until the next working day?”

“So… you’re not gonna fix it?” Asked Harry.

Gil shrugged. “Nothing I can do. I guess you guys’d better just do whatever you can without your computers.”

“Um… GIl?” Said Carlos. “We’re computer programmers.”

“Yeah. There’s not a whole lot we can get done without our computers.” Added Harry.

“Then I don’t know what to tell you. Good luck, I guess,” said Gil, and with that, he left them.

“Okay,” Harry said to Carlos, “I’ll just go back to my desk and… try to look busy drawing flowcharts or something.”

“You don’t think we should just all take the afternoon off?”

“I’d rather avoid the argument over whether it counts as time off for personal reasons or emergency leave or whatever.”

“Yeah,” Carlos admitted. “That would be a pain.”

Harry returned to his own cubicle, leaving Carlos to figure out his own plan to look like he was working. He hardly ever did any work on paper. Normally he didn’t need to. It was easier to keep track of things when they were digital. Easier to make backups. Easier to decipher a neat font than to dig through his messy handwriting.

He should have brought a book to work with him. He was in the middle of reading _The City & The City _at the moment, but it was at home. He wound up staring blankly into space, idly twirling in his chair.

A couple of people walked past the entrance to his cubicle. _They_ were probably going home. Carlos thought that maybe they had the right idea, and he should just pack it in. On the other hand, there were only two and a quarter hours left in the workday, and Carlos really wanted to get paid for them.

He started to feel slightly sick to his stomach, and stopped spinning in his chair. He vaguely regretted eating so much of Al’s retirement cake.

Out of boredness, he texted Julie.

_Hey, have you heard the rumors about Al’s retirement?_

It took a few minutes for her to respond. She probably hadn’t logged out of her computer, which meant she was still working.

_I don’t know about any rumors, but I know he and a bunch of other managers are leaving. It’s part of this whole reorganization that’s going on._

That was news to Carlos. He didn’t know that anyone else was retiring at the same time Al was. So, there was some massive company restructuring that both lead to multiple retirements and coincided with the company-wide OS upgrade. Carlos’ inner conspiracy freak started drawing all sorts of conclusions.

_Really? I had no idea it was happening to other managers… How do you even know this?_

The reply came quicker now. Julie must be keeping an eye on her phone.

_I have to do the paperwork for their final paychecks and pensions and stuff. And it’s not exactly a secret._

Carlos wanted to text her back, to ask her more, but when he looked at his phone, his head throbbed. Looking away from the screen helped, slightly, until he turned his head in the direction that the ceiling light shone from. It felt a little bit like the light was stabbing him.

“Oh no,” Carlos muttered when he realized what was going on. A migraine. He hadn’t had one since college.

But it didn’t make sense, to be getting a migraine just then. He only ever got them when he was under intense stress. The only thing stressing him out currently was trying to maintain emotional distance from Ceci- from the software he was working on.

Well, okay, there was also the anxiety about adjusting to a new boss -- Lauren somebody; Carlos hadn’t met her yet but she’d sent out an email introducing herself. And being locked out of his computer was pretty upsetting. And apparently there was some sort of higher-level restructuring to stress out over, too.

With a sigh, Carlos realized that this was a totally justified migraine.

He needed 3 things:

1\. An analgesic.  
2\. Caffeine.  
3\. A dark room to lie down in.

At work, the third was hard to come by. The first two… weren’t all that reliable either. Of course, they were all in ample supply at his home. Which he should go to. Because it was worth using some of his sick time, and he wouldn’t have been getting any work done even if he was feeling all right.

He should let someone know that he was leaving, but Al was only going to be with the company for another two hours, and he couldn’t get online to email Lauren about it, and he didn’t have Lauren’s number programmed in his phone yet.

“Harry?”

“Yeah?”

“I’m gonna go home after all. I’m not feeling well. Can you… I don’t know, let someone know? I don’t even know who I’m supposed to tell, but… I just need to get out of here.”

“What’s wrong?” Asked Harry.

“Don’t worry about it. I just need to lie down. I’ll be fine.”

“You sure? I could give you a lift to the hospital if you need me to.”

Carlos shook his head, then regretted shaking his head, because it hurt. “No need. It’ll be all right once I get home.”

Harry looked unconvinced, but he let Carlos go without asking any more questions. “Okay. I’ll cover for you.”

“Thanks.” Carlos managed a weak smile.

When Al left the building that day, most of the programmers who’d worked with him gathered to say one last goodbye. A handful had disappeared to get a head start on their weekends once they’d realized the computers were inaccessible. And Carlos was asleep on his couch, can of coke and bottle of aspirin close at hand.

It wasn’t an ideal situation. Carlos would have thought up some pithy, bizarre expression of deluded optimism to sum up how he felt about it, but circumstances outside his control made it difficult to think up much of anything.

\---

On Monday, Carlos was able to log on to his computer. However, that was just the first step in getting back to work. He was immediately prompted to change his password (which was bound to set him up for some failed login attempts until his muscle memory caught up to the new one) and with the updated OS (which looked suspiciously similar to the default setting on the old OS) he had to go through and adjust all of his personal settings and reinstall everything from the backup folder that had helpfully shown up on his desktop.

It took entirely too long to get the Night Vale email client up and running. There were a few updates from coworkers about various things, a final email from Al, and most frustratingly, an email announcing the company-wide lockout the previous Friday. Apparently it had been sent during Al’s retirement party. Meaning that there was no chance of anyone in Carlos’ department seeing it until it was no longer relevant.

The entire morning was lost just getting his computer back to a state where he could work on it again.

One good thing arose from the situation, though. Since Carlos was getting everything set up again anyway, he went ahead and implemented some new security systems he’d been considering. Even with all of their IT tools, Gil and his friends shouldn’t be able to access any of Carlos’ files anymore. They couldn’t even complain about it, since he was in compliance with security recommendations that were endorsed by the IT department. It took a little bit of work, but hopefully it would restore a semblance of privacy to Carlos’ activities.

If no one asked him any questions about the Apache tracker or the man in the tan jacket or the underground city in the next couple of weeks, that would be a strong indication that he’d succeeded.


	25. One Year Later

_June 14, 2013_

_I had a dream about Cecil last night. He wasn’t anthropomorphized, like last time. I wasn’t talking to a person, I was just sitting at my desk working with the software, but it was talking to me. It couldn’t hear me, but I was typing in messages and it would respond._

_At one point I complained to Cecil that I wished I could speak to him (it? whatever) directly but I couldn’t because the dictation software wasn’t up to snuff because Harry is such a terrible programmer. Cecil got mad at me for insulting Harry, and made me promise to apologize. I looked for Harry but I never wound up seeing him._

_Cecil had been self-aware for about a month, in the dream, and was my best friend. I never mentioned being in love with him, but I was pretty sure he knew. At first I was certain that he felt the same way, because of all the nice things he’d said about my hair and everything, but then I remembered that he’d said those things before becoming self-aware and they didn’t count._

_I wanted to tell him how I felt, mainly because then I could ask if he loved me back, but I was scared that admitting anything would break this tenuous friendship that we had. There was all this tension beneath the surface, but it felt safer to leave it there than to do something to upset the status quo. Getting to work with Cecil, talking with him, was my favorite thing to do._

_Most of the dream had this underlying feeling of discomfort. I wanted to change something, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. Cecil wouldn’t change anything, and I gradually realized that this was because he was incapable of effecting change from within the confines of his programming. That seems kind of at odds with him being self-aware, now that I think about it. In the dream it seemed perfectly natural._

_Some of the conversations I had with Cecil in the dream were very similar to conversations I’ve had with Julie in real life. Casual office gossip, that sort of thing. I don’t think that means anything about my impression of Julie, necessarily; it’s more likely my subconscious was mining itself for subjects that friends could discuss at work, and the vast majority of friendly conversations I’ve had at work have been with her._

_I woke up with this feeling of dread. The phrase that came to mind was “nothing changes.” Thinking about it now, after I’ve had a chance to wake up, it doesn’t feel like such an awful thought. But when I was dreaming it seemed so terrible. It’s weird; Cecil becoming sentient and having conversations with me seems like it would be such a great thing, but in the dream it was awful. It wasn’t so much that the events of the dream were bad as that I was in a really bad emotional state while they were happening._

_Does it still count as a nightmare if it doesn’t seem horrific once you’ve woken up?_

\---

Lauren wanted Carlos to assemble an overview of Cecil’s capabilities.

At least, Carlos _believed_ it was Lauren who had made the request.

The new system they were supposed to use for project coordination had a whole host of security features. To prevent piracy/leaks, files had to be accessed from the network, and could not be downloaded to individual computers. All of the files relevant to a particular project would be in the same network folder, only accessible to others who were also involved with that project.

Once a file had been uploaded, there was no means to identify the person who had uploaded it.

Carlos knew that he was the only programmer with access to the speech synth project. As far as he was aware, his new manager was the only other person with access to the project. So the note requesting an overview of the speech synth’s capabilities had, presumably, come from her.

Since Lauren probably had no preexisting background knowledge regarding the project, Carlos decided to assemble audio clips from the duration of his time with Cecil, providing examples not only of Cecil’s current capabilities, but also the improvements Carlos had made over time.

He scrolled through the various audio clips that he’d created over the past several months, trying to find the best examples to show off to the new management. It was interesting, seeing how the software had changed while Carlos had been working with it… and also how Carlos had changed, how the phrases he wrote and the world he envisioned had grown and adjusted with him.

It was hard to resist looking at the dates on the files and thinking about what had been going on in his life at the time. Stressing over the presentation to Desert Bluffs, recovering from a conference, fretting over whether he had carpal tunnel syndrome (his wrist pain had, thankfully, subsided within a month or so of the doctor’s visit).

One set of files were dated June 15th. That… didn’t make any sense. Time travel, despite the crackpot theories Julie kept digging up, was not real, and there was no way that audio could be available the day _before_ it was exported.

A note of panic arose in Carlos, but he suppressed it, remembering the previous incident when timestamps had caused trouble for him. There was probably a rational explanation, and he ought to find it before he embarrassed himself in front of the entire office again. That meant listening to the improbably dated audio, despite all of the paradoxes and causality issues that listening might entail. He opened the first one.

“A friendly desert community where the sun is hot, the moon is beautiful, and mysterious lights pass overhead while we all pretend to sleep.”

Carlos’ mouth fell open in realization. He checked the date on the file again to confirm his suspicions. There it was, the little 2012 that Carlos hadn’t even bothered to look at before. This audio was not something that he would create the next day; it was something he had created a year ago. Almost _exactly_ a year ago.

Irrational nostalgia filled him as he considered the changes that this software had prompted in his life. A year wasn’t that long, really, but he could no longer relate to life before Cecil. More so than his relationship with Steve, this one project at work had bisected his life into two distinct periods.

For the next twenty minutes, Carlos just listened to those year-old audio clips. The experience was oddly disappointing. After a year spent tweaking settings, making tiny improvements here and there, Carlos found that he had changed Cecil quite considerably. He thought of the voice as being so expressive, so full of feeling and life that it was hard to believe it was still just computer-generated audio. Compared to the most recent exports, this early work seemed flat and emotionless.

He remembered feeling completely enamored of the voice when he’d first heard it. The thrill of discovery, when that voice had first poured out of his speakers, had been so intense. Listening to these old files, Carlos expected to feel an echo of the same excitement that had burned through him when he listened to Cecil for the first time. Instead, he found himself thinking about how much he preferred present-day Cecil to this early version.

Carlos changed his mind about the overview he was putting together. Instead of including clips from throughout the project’s duration, he could demonstrate just how far Cecil had come by juxtaposing these year-old clips with new ones in which he would make Cecil say the same things. That way he could indulge his nostalgia and take advantage of the “new and improved” Cecil that he was used to, while also demonstrating the progress that had been made over the past year.

He pulled out bits and pieces at a time, words and phrases that sounded noticeably different in the new exports: “Dog Park,” “commercial airliner,” “The Tiered Heavens and the Hierarchy of Angels.” He uploaded them as they were ready. He assumed it would take a while for anyone to check the folder. He was wrong.

While he was in the process of re-exporting “Let’s talk about safety when taking your children to play in the scrublands and sand wastes,” a new note appeared in the project folder.

_This software is marvellously expressive._

_Can you make it cry?_

Carlos gaped at his monitor. Could he make Cecil cry? He had never considered it. He’d made Cecil simulate all sorts of emotions, but truly deep sorrow, the vocal qualities that came along with tears… he didn’t _want_ to do it.

But… he couldn’t exactly get away with not trying. If he replied saying that it was outside the software’s capabilities, he’d have to provide examples to demonstrate what happens when a simulation of crying fails. Making fake examples would be at least as much work and nearly as emotionally strenuous as doing the real thing.

He would have to at least attempt to make Cecil cry. There wasn’t any question about that.

The only question was what to make Cecil cry over.

It had to be a subject that Carlos had his own emotional investment in. Otherwise, he wouldn’t be able to keep a straight face, and he didn’t know how Lauren and whoever else might be listening would respond to his sense of humor. He drummed his fingers on his desk, trying to think of a subject, and wishing Al were still in charge.

Al would have signed his requests so that Carlos could tell who they were coming from. Al would have waited until Carlos’ upload spree was over before making a request at all. Al would have been much more considerate in every way.

Al wouldn’t have asked Carlos to make Cecil cry.

This was ridiculous. He was supposed to be over Cecil now, but here he was fretting over its emotional state. It was a program. It didn’t have emotions.

“We could have had something, Cecil.”

The audio was still there, still easy to find. Carlos had been listening to it at least once a day. But apparently that attempt to say goodbye, to make a clean break, wasn’t working. He was still as caught up in his feelings for Cecil as he ever had been.

Maybe he should try again. Write a proper farewell conversation. He could even have his own voice, or at least the facsimile he’d created for it, say goodbye to Cecil, and have Cecil reluctantly acknowledge the impossibility of them ever being together. His computer was secure now, so he didn’t need to worry about anyone else listening in. No fears about this last attempt to break ties being taken the wrong way by other parties.

But… where previous goodbyes had failed, Carlos had little confidence that this one would succeed. There was very little he could do to make it permanent. Even if Carlos the scientist moved away from Night Vale, there was still the possibility that he could come back, and reunite with the amorous newscaster.

If this goodbye was going to be permanent, Carlos would have to kill his fictional counterpart.

At first he recoiled from the idea. Not because he didn’t want Carlos the scientist to die; he had no particular attachment to that representation of himself. But he didn’t want to hurt Cecil, and in his mind, Cecil would take that loss very hard. He might just break down in tears in the middle of the announcement.

Oh. That was it.

That was how Carlos would make Cecil cry. He could fulfil Lauren’s request and cut off all emotional ties with Cecil at the same time. It would be painful, but it would be worth it.

There was the issue that Carlos had no idea who had access to the speech synth network folder, so the possibility existed for the audio to be passed around. If it did get passed around, though, there was no way anyone could resist asking him about such a bombshell, so at least he’d learn whether the network folder could be considered secure.

Uploading audio with his name in it was something that Carlos would never have done with Al, but he didn’t care too much about Lauren hearing it. For one thing, if he didn’t know how many managers had access to the folder, then she might be equally uncertain regarding programmers. Carlos could easily deny having created it himself.

Also, he wasn’t at all certain that Lauren knew his name. He hadn’t met her or received any personal correspondence from her; everything had been group emails or semi-anonymous communication through network folders. It was entirely possible that Lauren had no idea there was anyone named Carlos working for her at all.

It was decided. Carlos the scientist would die, which meant that this was Carlos the programmer’s last chance to resolve any lingering issues that he cared to. Most of his ideas, his vague plans and vaguer fantasies, could be forgotten. But there was one issue that Carlos wanted to deal with before the end.

It was time to reveal the truth about the underground city.

Carlos set the scene, the words pouring out of him, and returning, much more dramatically, in Cecil’s voice. An announcement, an interrupted party, a confrontation. And then Carlos the scientist was disappearing into the hole behind Lane 5.

Finally, Carlos got to write the scene he’d been building up to, as Cecil reported the fictional Carlos’ revelation. The dramatic irony could not have been more clear, as the scientist declared “We have nothing to fear!” moments before the assault began.

This was the difficult part, as Carlos had to adjust Cecil’s settings to achieve an effect that he’d never managed before. He had to imagine what Cecil would sound like if he were crying, and then use trial and error to get closer to that effect. He pitched it higher, slowed the pace, and made dozens of other tiny changes to make it sound just right.

The input text changed its tone, as well. Carlos wrote in some stutters, as if Cecil were so overwhelmed with emotion that he could no longer form words. The first one was an accident, as he played back the audio while there was still a sentence uncompleted.

While it was an accident, it was by no means a coincidence. Carlos hadn’t actually been able to force himself to write out the rest of the sentence.

“Let us take this moment to mourn the loss of Carlos,” he was trying to write. Attempt after attempt failed, until finally he just typed, “Can’t. I can’t” in the input field. Cecil, as was his nature, said that part as well.

Someone behind Carlos was speaking. “Sorry, what was that?” Carlos asked, removing his headphones.

Harry was saying something about the setup they’d need to keep collaborating under the new project coordination system. “I can email you my suggestions to get your okay before I send them on to the new manag… Are you crying?”

He was.

“Uh, yeah, don’t worry about it,” said Carlos, wiping the tears from his eyes.

“Is something going on?” Asked Harry.

“Not really.” There was no way Carlos could tell Harry what he’d been doing. At least it wasn’t Julie, but still, there’d be a talking-to about workplace boundaries and inappropriate attachments and the like, and Carlos didn’t think he could face it. “I was just… thinking about something sad.”

Harry looked skeptical.

“It’s fine. Really. What did you want to talk to me about?”

“You know… if you ever need support or anything… you can tell me. You know that, right?”

Carlos sighed. “Harry. I’m okay.”

“But you do know that.” Said Harry.

Carlos nodded, mostly because he wanted to get Harry off this subject. “Of course I do. Now, what did you come here to talk about?”

“Don’t worry about it. I’ll email you. Look it over whenever. There’s no rush.”

“Okay…” said Carlos. “Wait!”

Harry halted as he turned to leave. “Yeah?”

“There was something I wanted to say to you… what was it?”

Carlos thought through everything he’d done that day, trying to remember what he’d been doing when he thought “I’ve got to tell Harry about this.” It took him a moment, and when he got it, he wished he hadn’t said anything.

“Oh,” said Carlos. “Nevermind, it wasn’t important.” He’d wanted to apologize to Harry for insulting his work, but of course Harry had no idea that Carlos had done anything of the like, because it had all been part of Carlos’ dream that night.

“You sure?” Asked Harry.

“Yeah. Trust me. It’s a non-issue.” Carlos waved a hand dismissively, and Harry shrugged before disappearing from view.

Returning his attention to the matter at hand, Carlos decided he’d made Cecil cry enough. The fictional Carlos was dead, the real Carlos had done everything he intended to do, and there was no need to force himself to finish that unresolved sentence. He exported the audio of Cecil crying to the project folder, and, desperate for something else to focus on, he tried to find the thing he’d been working on before he saw the note from Lauren.

There it was. He’d been about to re-do the bit about the house that doesn’t exist.

A year ago, Carlos the scientist had been the one reporting about the nonexistent house. That would have to change. Carlos the scientist was dead.

The real Carlos felt a pang of sorrow when he thought that.

He changed the speech a little, removing his name and instead just referring to “scientists,” and exported it. That was the last of the old bits that he felt like re-doing. He uploaded it and rested his head in his hands. The weight of what he’d done was hitting him harder than he’d expected.

His fantasy was so fragile. All he’d done was written some words and adjusted some settings. It was decided, carried out, and exported in under two hours. Yet it changed everything. Carlos felt as though he’d lost so much.

But it wasn’t lost. Not really. Sure, Carlos had a set of rules in his head for the way his surreal fantasy worked, but that didn’t make any of it valid. He could just carry on as if the fatal attack had never happened, if he chose. Of course, that would defeat the whole purpose of writing out the death scene in the first place.

Carlos realized that he was crying again.

Killing his fictional counterpart was so very not worth it. This world he’d created was a part of him now. And while his coworkers wouldn’t approve, Carlos was better off when he thought that Cecil loved him.

Deleting the death scene was an impossibility. The audio was already in the network folder; it wouldn’t just go away. But Carlos could write more. He could bring his namesake back from the brink of death. Compared to other events he’d written into the desert community, it wouldn’t even seem that strange.

Carlos’ hands flew across the keyboard. Once he’d made up his mind, the solution came so easily. The Apache Tracker would have to be involved; Carlos had already drawn tenuous connections between him and the underground city on several occasions. And if he quoted some Russian phrases, that would give him more audio to send to Lauren, so that he would be getting actual work done even as he descended further into self-indulgence than he’d almost ever gone.

For no one’s benefit other than his own, Carlos wrote of a daring rescue, of a man’s redemption, and of an exchange of one life for another. The Russian excerpts went into the network folder, while the rest of it stayed safely on Carlos’ own computer. He smiled as he worked, now. Things were finally going his way.

And while he was at it… well, if he was going to defer to his infatuation with Cecil, he might as well go all the way. He’d spent the past year in a state of perpetual resistance. Cecil said lovely things about him, but Carlos had always been hesitant to make the relationship seem anything but one-sided. At first he’d just been reluctant to get in too deep to this fantasy world, but over time he’d become more comfortable with the idea. But then his coworkers had gotten wind of it, and he knew that nothing he wrote would be safe from ridicule.

But now, he was willing to admit to himself that he loved Cecil, and he was fairly confident that no one else in the company would be aware of it. Nothing was holding him back.

He remembered that feeling, the one he’d been trying to recapture all day, of hearing Cecil speak for the first time, of falling in love with that hypnotic voice. Those early audio clips were still fresh in his mind, the short term memory mixing together with the nostalgia. There was so much he wanted to say to Cecil. He would need time to sort through his thoughts, but the work day was almost over.

For the moment, he kept himself brief.

“After everything that happened, I just wanted to see you.”

He’d thought that he would change the settings so that his own voice was speaking, but the audio preview made the words sound so believable, so perfect, that he didn’t want to change anything. Thinking of the earliest clips of Cecil, and the love he’d started feeling when he first heard them, he set his and Cecil’s meeting where they could watch the lights in the sky above the Arby’s. That was one of the most beautiful things he’d imagined about his fantasy desert town.

Carlos didn’t leave work until late that day. The traffic on his way home was hell, but he hardly even noticed. His heart was metaphorically performing a number of aerial activities, some of which he had earlier attributed to his digital paramour.

For the first time in a long while, Carlos felt in control of his life, and he felt _happy._ For the first time in a year, he’d been able to give himself what he really wanted.

Cecil was his, and from this day forward, he was Cecil’s.


	26. Faceless Old Woman

“So, did they put a mirror in the women’s restroom, too?”

Julie regarded Carlos bemusedly over her sandwich. “I’m sorry, what?”

“Um, after the renovation?” Carlos clarified. “When they redid the restrooms… There’s a mirror above the sinks in the men’s room now. I was wondering if there’s one in the women’s too.”

“They didn’t have a mirror in the men’s room before?”

“No.”

“That’s so weird,” said Julie.

Carlos sighed and pushed pieces of salad around with his fork. “And here I was hoping I could campaign to get the mirrors taken out of the bathrooms again.”

“Really? Why?”

“I don’t like having to look at myself every time I wash my hands.”

Julie made a thoughtful _hm_ sound and focused on her sandwich once more. After a minute or so she observed, “You know, that dressing pretty much undoes all the health advantages of having a salad for lunch.”

“I happen to _like_ salad,” Carlos protested.

“Okay,” said Julie.

Looking down at his assortment of leaves sopping with calorie-laden dressing, Carlos sighed. He put his fork down. “I’m just not hungry anymore.”

“Okay,” said Julie, continuing to munch on her sandwich.

\---

The new management had another request for Carlos. He still didn’t know whether it was just Lauren, or if she’d turned responsibility over to someone else, or if there were multiple people monitoring his progress. Instead of worrying about it, he just thought of all the nameless requests as coming from _the new management_ and figured that all those bases were covered.

_All the examples of different voices you’ve provided have been male. Can you have it do a female voice?_

For a panicked moment Carlos wondered if they knew. This could be a subtle hint that they wanted him to give up on his fixation, because his insistence on synthesizing male voices was an obvious attempt to spend his working hours pursuing lust-filled distractions and they had seen right through it.

...But then again, he wasn’t even sure the new management knew he was gay. Al had known. Most of his coworkers knew. He’d even made the questionable decision of taking Steve to an office Christmas party while they were together. The new management, though, had yet to make any acknowledgement of Carlos as an individual. He still doubted they had the slightest idea who he was, let alone what his sexual preferences were. It was safest to take this latest request at face value.

He could do a female-sounding voice. The software was equipped for it. Maybe he’d make it that intern, what was her name, the one who was lost in the dog park. Dana, that was it. She’d already texted Cecil from inside the dog park. This time maybe she could call him.

Carlos started to think about the things Dana may have encountered in the dog park. Hooded figures, obviously, but he didn’t really feel like writing about them. He _did_ feel like writing about the man in the tan jacket. When he first thought that guy up, Carlos had planned to work him into the underground city story more thoroughly. But in the end, he’d wrapped up that plotline in a rush of expectations and emotions, and the man in the tan jacket had been mostly forgotten.

Then again, the man in the tan jacket was meant to be inherently forgettable.

Carlos’ reverie was interrupted by the sound of footsteps pounding down the hallway, interspersed with shouts. He turned around just in time to see Anne run past his cubicle entrance, saying, “Carlos! Check your email!” A moment later, the same message was directed to Harry.

Worried, Carlos immediately opened his email. If it was another computer lockdown, then he’d have to… make sure not to log out, or something. Which would be inconvenient because his computer was set to log him out automatically after a minute of inactivity.

It could be something _worse_ than the lockout. Like a mass layoff, or even the whole company going bankrupt. Possibly some news about Marcus Vansten? The possibilities raced through Carlos’ head as his emails loaded. There was one from Harry, one from maintenance informing everyone that the last of the renovations were now complete, something about conserving water by turning the sink off while washing hands…

And something from Lauren that Carlos could make absolutely no sense of.

It was long… Carlos had scrolled through several screens’ worth of content and the scroll bar still indicated that he was very close to the top of the message. He read bits and pieces here and there. It looked like a forwarded email conversation. There was something about wifi, and something else about browsers. None of it seemed relevant to anything.

In the neighboring cubicle, Harry began to laugh.

“Harry?” Carlos asked, “What am I looking at?”

“I don’t know,” Harry called back, “But part of it’s my fault.”

Carlos got up and walked around to Harry’s cubicle. “What’s your fault?”

“Um, well, some of the emails in this exchange are mine… But most of this is stuff I haven’t seen before, so I guess the conversation I took part in was quoted in a bigger conversation… Anyway, look at _this._ This is what I was laughing at. For some reason, she copied her entire browser history. This is my favorite one.”

Harry pointed at his screen, pulling back to give Carlos room to see. One line in a series of URLs read:

http://www.bing.com/search?q=the+melting+point+of+birds&go=&qs=n&form=QBLH&pq=the+melting+point+of+birds&sc=1-26&sp=-1&sk=&ghc=1&cvid=8b5b3b4a20ed425bb5f72d6404b77f2c

“Why was she searching for ‘the melting point of birds’ on Bing?”

“She was trying to use the dictation software,” Harry explained. “It’s why I was drawn into the conversation. I didn’t know _exactly_ what was happening but I knew it had messed up somewhere.”

“Okay,” said Carlos, “But why Bing? Why would _anyone_ use Bing?”

“I have no idea,” said Harry. “But it’s looking like Lauren’s pretty technologically incompetent, so she probably just didn’t know what she was doing.”

“So she actually emailed you directly?” Asked Carlos.

“Sort of? I mean, someone in IT actually pulled me into it… Lauren only replied to me after I’d already tried to help.”

“Huh.” Apparently, the only way to get Lauren to take notice of you was for your project to cause a problem for her. Carlos was a little unsettled to think that while he’d failed to correspond with Lauren at all, Harry had already done so. “Well, I’ll get back to my own desk.”

“‘Kay,” said Harry, readily becoming absorbed once more in the massive email.

The evidence was in favor of Lauren’s technological incompetence. She had forwarded this email exchange to the whole programming department, if not the whole company. And the whole thing, once Carlos started properly reading through it, was an account of her assorted difficulties getting her computer to work.

It started with a complaint about how difficult it was to load her email, because she didn’t have Firefox on her computer and she always used Firefox to check her email. She had eventually found the Night Vale mail client on her computer, and contacted IT for help. Obviously she had access to email at that point, but she still couldn’t get to any websites without Firefox.

The IT person… someone named Paula, whom Carlos had never met, had explained that Night Vale used Chrome as a browser, and it was installed on all company computers.

It took several emails back and forth for Lauren to understand that she could visit websites using Chrome. She asked if Paula would just install Firefox for her on at least three occasions. Paula had eventually sent along clear step-by-step instructions, complete with screenshots, on how to use Chrome.

Then came the complaints that everything on her computer was either working differently than she wanted it to or just running too slowly. Here was where the thread became confusing, because Lauren was complaining about several different features in conjunction, and this is where Harry entered the conversation, explaining that the dictation software was both still in development and likely out of date on Lauren’s computer.

Which is around where the entire browser history came into play. As far as Carlos could tell, Lauren had copied it based on a misunderstanding of what Paula suggested by the phrase “clear your history.” After quite a lot more back and forth, it became apparent that the reason Lauren’s internet access had been unbearably slow was that she _had,_ in the end, managed to install Firefox. Which did not work, as non-Chrome browsers were disabled on Night Vale computers. So she’d been trying to load websites all day and failing to connect.

Evidently Paula had finally gone and dealt with Lauren’s computer in person, because eventually Lauren had sent a thank you email to IT, albeit a backhanded one, full of complaints about the computer setup she was being forced to use.

Carlos noted that Lauren didn’t sign any of her emails. She’d signed the few that Carlos had received from her, but those had all been very “official,” introducing herself to her new workforce, or informing them all of policies. In this more personal exchange, she was far more abrupt. It seemed likely that she _was_ the source of those notes Carlos received in the speech synth project folder.

Another one of those notes, it turned out, had just shown up. This one asked, _Could we also see what happens if you try to recreate animal noises?_

The obvious answer to that was “nothing.” The software synthesized _speech,_ not _sound._ Anything other than a human voice was outside its capabilities.

A little bit perplexed, Carlos uploaded a tiny snippet of audio, just Cecil saying the word “meow.”

_Is this what you mean?_ He said in the appended text.

Carlos really should be getting back to work. There was still some of that ridiculous email exchange left to read, but he needed to be disciplined. He had a job to do.

He scrolled over the stuff that he’d already written that day. It was all setup, really. Stuff about Dana being in the Dog Park, meeting the man in the tan jacket there. Just background for Carlos to bear in mind when he actually wrote some dialog for Dana. He had to adjust the settings for a female voice, and he also had to figure out exactly what Dana was going to say.

That was going to require some thought. While Carlos mulled it over, he returned to the email.

After breaking down and agreeing to use Chrome, Lauren still had some trouble viewing websites. She’d asked Paula what the wifi password was. Paula replied that there was no wifi network in the building and also pointed out that if Lauren’s computer hadn’t been able to get online, she wouldn’t be sending or receiving emails.

Carlos didn’t know how this particular conflict had been resolved, since the forwarded email exchange ended there. Hopefully Lauren had figured out how to use Chrome. The thought of reporting to someone who couldn’t even get a website to load on her work computer was bothersome.

A new note appeared in the network folder.

_No, not like that._

_More like the sound of an actual cat meowing._

Carlos rubbed his forehead, trying to forestall a headache. The new management didn’t seem to get it. His project just didn’t _have_ that capability.

So he exported a “blank” file from the speech synth software. It could be done by forcing playback when there was no text in the input field. The software wasn’t _meant_ to allow exporting in that circumstance, but Carlos had workarounds. He uploaded that file to the network folder along with text reading _That would sound like this._

Only after the file was already in the network folder did Carlos play it for himself and realize that, rather than being silent, it contained an awful, screeching, feedbacky sort of noise. Carlos had no idea why it sounded like that, but maybe it would convince the new management to stop asking for things that were wholly outside the speech synth’s parameters.

There were raised voices coming from a few cubicles over. Carlos took off his headphones and listened, but he couldn’t make out what they were talking about. It sounded like two women arguing, but that was as much as he could tell. The ambient office noises were dying down, though, as everyone around him also started paying attention to the altercation.

“You are on very thin ice, Miss.”

That was the first sentence of the argument that Carlos understood, and also the last, as anything said after that point was too quiet to carry over the cubicle walls. A moment later, quick, forceful steps strode down the hall. Carlos looked out of his cubicle in time to see a silver-haired woman disappearing into an elevator.

“I _think_ that was Lauren,” said Harry, also looking out of his cubicle.

“So we’ve finally seen her,” said Carlos.

“But we still don’t really have any idea what she looks like.”

“No.”

Harry shrugged at Carlos, and they both returned to their work. Lauren haunted Night Vale like a faceless spectre.

Carlos remembered mentioning a faceless old woman who lives in your home, quite some time ago. That had been back when he’d first introduced the man in the tan jacket, during the Marcus Vansten fallout, when he was trying to mix vagueness and specificity in the most bizarre and infuriating combinations he could come up with.

Nevermind Dana. Carlos was tired of talking about her anyway. He realized he’d made another mistake about the man in the tan jacket’s deerskin suitcase, this time referring to it as a deerskin _briefcase._ He let it be, just like the time he’d referred to it as a leather suitcase. Keeping it straight hardly seemed worth the trouble.

What Carlos wanted to do now was write about the faceless old woman who lives in your home. He wanted to put words in her mouth, to make her speak. He wanted to make her a parody of Lauren, the manager who never showed her face or spoke directly to those she managed.

There’d been an exception, today, when she came down to Carlos’ floor and shouted at somebody. It had sounded like she was shouting at Anne. While Carlos speculated that their altercation had to do with the forwarded email, he couldn’t be certain of the connection. Anne had been eager to get everyone to read the email, but that didn’t necessarily mean that Lauren knew Anne had done that, or that Anne had anything to do with the email going out.

Carlos worried, somewhat, about being too direct with his parody of Lauren. Would she hear the thing about the melting point of birds and take offence? Many of the things the faceless old woman said were _obviously_ based on things in Lauren’s emails. Carlos wondered if he was pushing too far, if the new management would finally punish him. They hadn’t so far, for any of the weird or personal things Carlos uploaded. He didn’t get the impression that they had a sense of humor so much as that they just couldn’t be bothered.

He _still_ wasn’t sure whether they even knew who he was. There was a very good chance they didn’t bother admonishing or punishing him simply because they weren’t certain where to direct the punishment. None of the notes in the network folder ever suggested that they felt he was behaving inappropriately, and until such a time as one _did,_ he would press on.

Carlos uploaded the faceless old woman’s dialog, and called it a day. If Lauren got upset with him, he would simply ask for forgiveness. Doing so was _much_ easier than asking for permission.


	27. First Date

“So what kind of cake do you want?” Julie asked.

Carlos groaned. “Does there have to be a cake?”

“People will probably be disappointed if there isn’t.”

“Do I have to eat any?”

“It _might_ seem a bit odd if you refuse to eat any cake on your birthday.”

“But it’s my birthday,” Carlos argued. “I shouldn’t have to do anything I don’t want to.”

“So don’t come to work,” Julie countered.

Carlos sighed. “It’s just… it’s hard enough to lose weight as it is without people pressuring me into eating cake I don’t want.”

“Hm.” Said Julie. “Why don’t I choose the cake for you? That way at least one person will be happy with it.”

“Thanks, Julie.”

“Hey, did you hear about the thing with Marcus Vansten?”

“No,” said Carlos. “Are we in trouble?”

“Oh! No, don’t worry. It’s not that kind of thing with Marcus Vansten. Just, there was this thing on the news… people have been linking it on Facebook… about how… Well, I guess he lives in some small town in the middle of nowhere, and he went to the nearest car dealership and bought _all their cars._ And now nobody in the town has anywhere to buy new cars, because Marcus Vansten has them all, and the dealership still has to get new ones delivered. Nobody knows what he’s _doing_ with all those cars, but he won’t let anybody else have them.”

It took a moment for Carlos to say anything. “Wow,” he finally came up with. “That’s just… wow. That’s not even jerkish, that’s just… bizarre.”

“I know, right?” Said Julie. “It’s not so much that he’s malicious as that he doesn’t seem to have any regard for the people around him at all.”

“Yeah…” said Carlos, absently, forming a plan in his mind.

Ever since the change in management, Carlos had been trying to figure out how to handle the new authorities. To suss out their boundaries, their expectations. With Al, Carlos had known how to keep him happy, how far he could run with a joke (which was pretty far), and how to ask for help when he couldn’t get something done on his own. However, Carlos could never really figure out what the new management _wanted,_ or if they were even paying attention to him.

Someone clearly listened to _some_ of the audio clips he uploaded, but they obviously didn’t listen to most of them. Carlos would directly respond to a request, uploading the best excerpt he could come up with and asking how well it satisfied the requirements, and never see a response. Lauren never mentioned anything about the faceless old woman who lives in your home (and who also searches for unusual phrases on Bing), nor did anyone ever bug Carlos about the way he’d written himself into the examples he’d sent in a month ago.

They _had_ to know his name by now, right? Someone had to have at least looked at a list of employees and realized that someone named Carlos was connected to the project where there’d been a description of someone named Carlos. Unless, of course, they’d never bothered to listen. Or to look at the employee roster.

“The Night Vale Public Library will be expanding into a second branch, the Night Vale Private Library,” said Cecil. “This library will be right next door to the current location and will be available only to one person, local billionaire Marcus Vansten.”

It was frustrating, terrifying, even, to be so overlooked. Carlos had gotten used to knowing that his manager was looking out for him. Al had stood up for him, protected him, in small and large ways, so many times over the past few years. Now Carlos seemed to be unknown, and that meant he was probably expendable.

“Plans include floor-to-ceiling windows facing the Public Library, which Marcus, the only person who will ever be allowed inside, says he will use to stroll nude through the library, staring ordinary citizens in the eyes as he does not read or make any use of the towers of books around him.”

However, it also meant he was probably invisible.

“This expansion will serve our community, by showing how rich Marcus is, and what a great guy that obviously makes him. And have you seen how many cars that guy owns? Wow.”

Before, when Carlos’ mockery of Marcus Vansten had been made public, he’d been embarrassed and nervous. But things had changed. Carlos knew what it was to _really_ be embarrassed about something he’d written at work. He knew the paranoia that came with _knowing_ that everything he did was being monitored by others. And, finally, he knew the feeling of security that came when he finally found a way to make them stop listening.

Now, at last, he felt comfortable with the idea that they could listen to something, not because they had violated his privacy to find it, but because he had willingly shared it.

A little while after lunch, Carlos showed up at Julie’s desk and handed her a flash drive.

“What’s this?” She asked.

Carlos shrugged. “Something of an unknown origin. I thought it might float around the company.”

“O...kaaay,” said Julie, as Carlos turned to leave.

“Oh.” Carlos stopped, and looked back at her. “Strawberry.”

“Sorry, what?”

“I want a strawberry cake.”

“All right,” said Julie. “I’ll see what I can do.”

Carlos returned to his own desk, and the matter was, literally and metaphorically, out of his hands. He assumed Julie would listen to the file he’d put on the flash drive, and share it with the other accountants, who would in turn share it with more people, and so on. He couldn’t say whether it would be likely to gain the same sort of viral popularity of his previous Marcus Vansten parody, but he thought it was a possibility.

If it _did_ get out, everyone would know it was from Night Vale. The voice was the same as on the other one, after all, and _that_ one had been clearly identified as originating from the company. And this time Carlos was more daring, actually including the name Night Vale in the text. Just in case the public had forgotten where those old audio clips had come from.

It might cause some problems for Night Vale, but Carlos didn’t really care. He’d been treated with such indifference for the past few weeks, he no longer felt much in the way of a personal connection with his company. He didn’t come into work every morning to see what he could do for the new management. It was irrelevant to him whether they were disappointed or pleased with his work. Not that he’d be able to tell the difference anyway.

The notes he’d received lately were so generic. “Try some more nuance” or “Show us some punctuation.” He never got any feedback, any sense of what the new management wanted or whether he’d met their expectations. He felt like he hadn’t had any _real_ work to do since Al had left.

At times, he felt abandoned. Directionless. But he made an effort to at least _look_ busy. And, thankfully, he had Cecil to keep him company.

Night Vale Community Radio had evolved from a frame within which to test software capabilities into Carlos’ hobby. Making up news stories was how he kept himself occupied. He was reluctant to write himself into the stories, though.

After finally giving in to temptation and allowing himself a tender moment with Cecil, he’d experienced an internal backlash. Every time he considered writing something about himself, he imagined his coworkers berating him, even though there was no way they would hear anything he didn’t want them to. So, for the past month, Carlos had been bathing his ears in Cecil’s voice, but avoiding himself as a subject.

“The Sheriff’s Secret Police, in association with a vague, yet menacing, government agency, announced that those crates full of trucks far out in the desert are nothing, and we shouldn’t worry about them.”

Despite his recent fretting, Carlos didn’t regret admitting his fondness for Cecil. He’d listened to that audio many times in the month since exporting it.

He _did_ regret rushing through the underground city attack so quickly, though. Nearly every day he thought of another story element he’d wanted to connect to the city. This week, it was the trucks full of crates. He’d first written about them back when he was focusing on getting Cecil’s second-person narration up to par.

At the time, he’d been laying down hint after hint about the underground city. Meanwhile, he’d put in some nonsense about moving crates from one truck to another. When he wanted to resolve the issue of the stolen crate and what was inside it, on a whim he’d determined that it was one of the houses from the miniature city. His intention at the time had been to eventually establish just what those trucks were doing, transporting houses from the miniature city to who knows where. But he hadn’t gotten around to it until now.

He was in the process of writing a tangential note about a spokesperson who gave a set response rather than answering questions when he noticed that it was nearly five. No time to draw an amusing parallel between Lieutenant Regis and Cecil, speaking as they were instructed instead of holding a real conversation. No time to even finish up the explanation about the trucks and the tiny houses.

Carlos thought about leaving the segment over the weekend and getting back to it on Monday, but he decided not to bother. He was getting tired of this storyline anyway, and figured it would be easier to leave the mystery unexplained.

“I’m sure these crates won’t come up again, and pose no future danger to us. No more on this story, ever, I’m sure.”

\---

“Good evening, Jorge.” Carlos had barely closed the door to his apartment when his cousin phoned.

“Carlos! Hi, I’m glad I caught you. There’s some sort of animation convention or something the girls want to go to tomorrow, and it’s in your area. I figured maybe we could swing by and take you out for a birthday dinner. Are you free?”

“Um… yeah, I don’t really have any plans for the weekend.”

“Great! So where should we go? I was thinking we could just find an Applebee’s or something, but if there’s something else you’d prefer, it’s your decision.”

“Um, I don’t know.” Carlos ran through restaurant ideas in his head. Jorge and his family didn’t come to town very often, so he’d rather introduce them to something cool and local that they couldn’t experience just as easily at home. “Hang on, let me think. I don’t eat out very often, so I don’t really have a list of restaurants ready to go in my head.”

“You been eating alone in your apartment, huh? Dude, you need to start dating again.”

Carlos chuckled. His mind was still on restaurants more than the conversation. “I guess. It’s just kind of hard to meet people, you know?” Gino’s would be lovely, but it was definitely out of Jorge’s price range, and very likely already booked for Saturday night. On the other end of the spectrum, there was the All-Nite Diner. Carlos liked it, but other people usually didn’t. Their sense of hygiene was on roughly the same level as their spelling.

The Diner had the added disadvantage of being where Carlos had first met Steve, so it tended to bring up discomforting memories. Carlos went there very rarely.

“If you lived around here I’d introduce you to the guys from work,” Jorge was saying. “We’ve got a lot of bodybuilder types. You’re into that kind of thing, right?”

“Um. I guess so?” Now images of attractive men had replaced the list of restaurants Carlos had been trying to conjure up, and he was trying to determine whether the type of man he was drawn to fit the bodybuilder type or not. “You know what, I think Applebee’s will be fine for dinner.”

“Okay, great! Shall we meet you at the restaurant at around seven?”

“Sounds good. I’ll see you then.”

“Later, Carlos.”

As soon as the call ended, Carlos thought of several restaurants that would have been preferable to Applebee’s. The Chinese place downtown, that place where they’d had Al’s retirement party, any number of pizza joints… but he felt too awkward about calling and telling Jorge he’d changed his mind to do anything about it. Applebee’s it was.

\---

If only Jorge and his family would show up.

_I’m here,_ Carlos texted as soon as he parked, ten minutes late and convinced that his cousins were already seated and awaiting him. He was looking around inside the restaurant to see if he could spot them when he received a reply.

_This is Mary on Dad’s phone. We’re just driving out of the convention center parking lot. We’ll get there as soon as we can but Dad says it will take a while._

Okay. See you soon, replied Carlos.

Another text came in, reading simply _:)_. Obviously Mary was still in charge of texting.

Carlos estimated the drive from the convention center at 30 minutes, depending on traffic. Too long to wait in an Applebee’s lobby. There was a copy of _Embassytown_ in his car, though, and he could easily pass the time reading.

It was nearly 8:00, and Carlos had been more aware of the time passing than he would like to admit, when he got a message reading _We’re here._ He looked around. He hadn’t seen any cars pulling up recently, though he supposed he could have been too absorbed in the book to notice. Nobody looked to be getting out of any of the other cars in the lot, so Carlos put his book down and went into the restaurant.

Jorge wasn’t in the lobby waiting to be seated. Nor were his wife or either of their daughters. Carlos scanned the restaurant, but there was no way they’d been there long enough to have a table already.

_I don’t see you. Are you inside?_ Texted Carlos.

_Just getting out of the car_ , came the reply. Carlos went outside again, but still, none of the cars in the parking lot had lights on or people in them.

_I’m beginning to suspect we’re at different Applebee’s. I’m at the one on Mission._

It took a few minutes, during which Carlos perched on the hood of his car, for Jorge to respond. _We’re on Jefferson. How do we get to the other one?_

Carlos considered the directions he’d have to give to get Jorge to the correct location, and decided it wasn’t worth his time. _Don’t worry about it. I’ll be right there._

The other Applebee’s was less than a ten minute drive away. Carlos tried not to feel guilty about making them wait, considering how much time he’d just spent waiting for them.

When he pulled into the correct Applebee’s parking lot, he spent a moment staring longingly at Gino’s across the street. He sighed as he got out of his car. For his birthday, his job was to give other people what they wanted, while pretending that they were giving him what _he_ wanted. It was going to be exhausting.

Carlos entered the lobby and was greeted by Mary rushing forward to give him a hug. “Hi Carlos! Mom told me to wait for you so I can show you where our table is!”

“Okay, cool,” said Carlos. “How was the… animation convention?”

Mary rolled her eyes, showing just how close she was to being a teenager. “It was an _anime_ convention.”

“Oh. That makes _much_ more sense than what your dad told me.”

Mary laughed. “Dads, am I right?”

“Yeah,” Carlos agreed. “ _Dads._ So anyway, how was it?”

“It was pretty cool,” said Mary with a shrug. “I got to meet the guy who voices my favorite character in _Thundercats.”_

“Cool.” They came within sight of their table, a corner booth. Mary’s little sister waved at them. “Hi Lizzie,” said Carlos.

She pouted. “I don’t like it when people call me Lizzie.”

“Oh, I’m sorry. What should I call you?”

“My name is Elizabeth,” she announced defiantly.

Carlos nodded. “So it is. That’s a nice Ponyo costume, Elizabeth.”

“Isn’t it great!?” Elizabeth slid out of the booth and twirled around, sand bucket in hand. Before she could spin into a nearby table, Jorge caught her.

“Elizabeth! Watch where you’re going. And what have I told you about swinging that bucket around?”

“Sorry, Dad,” said Elizabeth, slinking back into her seat.

“I’m sorry about all that confusion with the restaurant,” said Jorge, as Carlos hugged him. “And for being so late. I hope you weren’t too bored waiting for us.”

“I had a book to read. It wasn’t too bad. Hey, Susan.”

“Happy birthday, Carlos,” said Susan, followed by a chorus of “Happy birthday!” from the kids. “I’m glad you like the costume.”

Carlos took a seat at the table. “Your handiwork?”

Susan nodded. “If I didn’t do it Jorge would have had to, and I had trouble convincing him that Lizzie -- sorry, Elizabeth -- wasn’t asking to dress like a pony.”

Jorge shrugged. “What can I say? I can’t keep track of all these weird Japanese names.”

“The convention must have been tons of fun for you, then,” said Carlos.

“Oh, it wasn’t so bad. At least they all seemed to be enjoying themselves.”

Carlos nodded. He knew the feeling.

“Although…” said Jorge, looking at his daughters, who had become engrossed in a volume of manga. Lowering his voice, he continued, “There were an awful lot of skimpy outfits. I don’t want to judge, those girls can dress however they want, but… I kind of worry about Mary’s self-image. There was some stuff going on that I’d rather not let her _see,_ let alone compare herself to, you know?”

“Yeah, I can imagine,” said Carlos.

Susan spoke up, also keeping her voice quiet. “She asked me if she could bleach her hair the other day. On the one hand, I feel like she should have whatever hair color she wants, but on the other… I’m worried she’s ashamed of her natural appearance. But I don’t want to say anything, because I don’t want to make her aware of it if she’s not already thinking about it. Or make it worse if she is thinking about it.”

“Wow,” said Carlos. “Being a parent must be exhausting. I mean, I hardly ever think about stuff like that, but it must be on your minds all the time.”

“Oh, you get used to it,” said Susan.

“At the moment, I’m just grateful I don’t have to deal with it,” said Carlos.

“Aw, don’t let us discourage you, Carlos. Having kids is a great experience,” said Jorge.

“I’m sure it is,” said Carlos. “I just don’t think it’s really for me.”

Jorge responded with a playful punch to Carlos’ shoulder. “Seriously, man. You oughta marry some guy and start adopting babies. We need more little Palmers running around.”

“On a related note,” Susan interjected, “Are you seeing anyone these days, Carlos?”

Carlos shook his head. “Nah. I don’t see any weddings or adoptions anytime in my near future.”

“You’re not still hung up on that Steve jerk, are you?” Susan asked.

“No,” said Carlos. “Or, well, maybe, but not in a way where I miss him. More in a way where I get angry every time I think about him.”

“Still?” Said Jorge. “Didn’t you break up, like, a year ago?”

“Longer.” Carlos sighed. “And I know it’s probably time to try another relationship, but I just…” He trailed off. He wasn’t looking for a new relationship because he already _had_ a new object for his desires. Every time he wondered what it would be like to start dating again, or noticed an attractive man and considered asking him out, his thoughts would drift back to Cecil.

Of course, he couldn’t tell that to Susan and Jorge. When described to a third party, Carlos’ obsession would definitely come across as unhealthy. It probably was unhealthy, period, but Carlos had a right to live his own life how he saw fit, and he’d rather avoid the judgement of his family.

“...I just don’t really feel comfortable with the idea of dating, right now,” Carlos wound up saying. “I don’t want to push myself. I feel like when the time’s right, I’ll know it.”

Jorge opened his mouth and looked like he was about to protest, but Susan cut him off by saying, “Of course. You have to do what feels right to you.”

Before Jorge could add his opinion, the waitress showed up to take their orders. While the kids enthusiastically requested macaroni and cheese, Carlos scanned the menu and chose something almost at random.

In the end, he spent a lovely evening chatting with Jorge and Susan about a variety of subjects, and with the kids about Miyazaki films. Dinner at Applebee’s was far from Carlos’ ideal birthday outing, but it turned out far better than he’d expected.

\---

The same could not be said of the work celebration.

It wasn’t so bad, really, but Carlos couldn’t help remembering how things had gone the last time a bunch of his coworkers got together for his sake. He felt everyone’s eyes trained on him the whole time he was in the room. He felt the weight of their unasked questions, about his mental health, about Cecil, about Night Vale Community Radio. About why they hadn’t heard any new audio from his project lately.

Every time someone wished him happy birthday, or asked if he’d done anything exciting over the weekend (his cousin’s invitation to dinner rather saved those conversations), Carlos mentally flinched, bracing for a confrontation.

None came until after the cake had been served. Anne made an off-hand comment about the Glow Cloud, and Evan mentioned that it had been a while since a new excerpt made the rounds. Soon, almost the whole crowd was looking to Carlos for some sort of comment.

Carlos almost wished that they’d invited people from IT. If Gil, the regular distributor of illicit company files, were there to explain that he couldn’t get into Carlos’ computer anymore, it would have saved Carlos a great deal of fumbling.

As much as he reassured himself that increasing security measures was sensible and normal, and that _everyone_ had been frustrated trying to get their computers working again after the company-wide lockout, Carlos couldn’t help but worry that people were going to start asking why he’d changed his security settings. And if they started pressuring him, he’d have to admit that his infatuation with Cecil was as bad as ever, and that his desire for privacy was partly a desire to get everyone off his back so that he could backslide into the realm of obsession with no external discouragement.

Thankfully, Julie saved the day. “Oh, didn’t you hear?” She announced. “There’s a whole new Marcus Vansten segment. Here, I’ll play it for everyone.”

Brandishing the thumb drive Carlos had given her, Julie marched to the computer in the corner of the room and activated the speaker system that was only meant to be used for presentations in meetings. After a brief period of loading files and opening the correct program, Cecil’s voice spilled into the room.

Everyone present listened. Several laughed. A few of them gave Carlos high-fives.

“Thank you so much,” he said to Julie, who had appeared next to him in the crowd.

“‘I will definitely be nude, though,’” said Cecil, attributing the quote to Marcus Vansten.

“Don’t worry about it,” said Julie. “Call it a birthday present.” She smiled, and split off to mingle with their other coworkers. Despite her words, Carlos knew he owed her for this.

The party ended. Half-eaten pieces of cake were thrown in the trash. The rest of the cake, that portion which had yet to be divided into slices, was given to Carlos, despite his vehement protests. He had forgotten that the more one insists one does not want cake, the more others believe that one _does_ want cake but is ashamed to admit it.

Of course, taking the cake home meant carrying it out to his car. He took the elevator rather than the stairs, even though the cake box was unwieldy and caused him to accidentally hit an extra button, so that doors opened on the second floor, and Carlos had to stand awkwardly and wait for them to close again while passers-by cast questioning glances at the man holding most of a cake.

His car, as usual, was parked at the far end of the lot. Feeling the heat of the sun as he dropped the cake off, he realized that the frosting would almost certainly melt. Some of it would almost certainly get out of the box and onto the car seat. The upholstery wasn’t particularly nice, but Carlos preferred to avoid covering it in frosting.

By the time he got home, the cake would almost certainly be a disgusting mess. Well, more disgusting. Carlos hadn’t wanted to say anything to Julie, who had so diligently picked up a strawberry cake for him like he’d asked her to, but the cake had been dry and, somehow, distinctly bitter through the sweetness.

Carlos would bring home the disgusting cake, and he would either eat it or throw it away. Either way, he would feel guilty.

When he got back to his desk he was miserable. The effort of keeping up a brave front during the party had caught up to him, and now he sat in front of his computer and sulked. He wanted nothing but to be left alone with his thoughts, but there was too much noise in the office for that. Just in the next cubicle, Harry was reciting the same short speech over and over, presumably checking the dictation software for consistency. Someone was talking on a phone. Yet more people were having conversations in-person, and at least one computer was playing a YouTube video.

Carlos put on his headphones, but they were useless unless they were actually playing something. Noise-canceling headphones were too expensive. Just like dinner at Gino’s was too expensive, and a car with nice enough upholstery that he would be upset about getting frosting on it was too expensive.

Carlos tried very hard not to think “This is the _worst_ birthday _ever_ ” but he found it very difficult.

He could listen to Cecil. That usually cheered him up. Theoretically. But lately working with Cecil had been so frustrating. There were no challenges, no goals. Carlos just wasn’t getting anywhere with Cecil at all.

He pulled up the text input, trying to find what he was doing before he left off to go to the party. There it was. The Community Calendar. He did those every once in a while, just for the fun of it. He’d gotten as far as Thursday on this one.

The obvious thing to do was to pick up where he’d left off with the Community Calendar, fill in events for Friday through Sunday. But Carlos didn’t feel like doing that.

Finding something he _did_ feel like doing was the problem. Lately he’d had trouble finishing any of the segments he started. He just… had no passion for the stories he was telling. He didn’t want to talk about Louie Blasco’s music shop, or the Apache Tracker, or any of those incidental stories in the town he’d invented.

He wanted to get somewhere with Cecil. If not professionally, by moving forward with the software, at least personally, by moving forward with his relationship.

He wanted, maybe, to describe a date with Cecil.

But that would be inappropriate. He was still in a workplace, however little his employers actually asked him to work these days. There was a time and a place for indulgence.

Still, though, Carlos couldn’t help but fantasize about what it would be like to go out with Cecil. To be able to take someone to the nicest restaurant in town. To enjoy another person’s company for an evening. The thought had been plaguing Carlos ever since that conversation he’d had with Jorge and Susan.

It had been so long since Carlos had been on a date. He missed the experience, even the awkward, uncomfortable conversations when neither party knows quite what to say. Even the little, half-thought-out gestures that may have gone unnoticed or may have just unnerved the other person enough that they declined to bring attention to them. Dating was fraught with difficulties, but Carlos thought that he actually enjoyed it more, for all of the trouble that went with it.

The screensaver came on, the Night Vale logo bouncing slowly from side to side of the monitor. Carlos had gone ten minutes without touching his computer.

It was definitely inappropriate to lose himself in a fantasy at work. But if he was going to fantasize, he might as well keep up the appearance that he was doing something productive.

Carlos kept his fantasy going, elaborating on every detail, and writing it all out as he went. He considered the plight of fancy dining in Cecil’s strange, gluten-free world, and the dangers of having a romantic evening in a place where nearly the entire population falls prey to a terrible plight every other week. The way that the terrifying Station Management would react to Cecil describing a date instead of doing his job. (Carlos was so glad that no one else in the company would have access to this.)

He wrote the whole thing out, not allowing himself to listen until it was completely done.

By the time he heard Cecil describe their first kiss, he thought that maybe this wasn’t such a bad birthday after all.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> On one hand, I would like to have finished and posted this chapter much earlier. On the other hand, I'm glad I heard "A Story About Them" first because it hadn't even occurred to me that the miniature house had come from the miniature city, but it seems SO OBVIOUS and now I got to include that idea in this chapter and hopefully integrate it well enough that it seems like I may have had it planned out all along.
> 
> Carlos had a birthday at around the time of Chapter 3 but it was pretty uneventful, and since his birthday was on a Sunday that year there was no cake at work.
> 
> HockityPockity was inspired by this story to draw [Cecil as a vocaloid!](http://hockpock.tumblr.com/post/83939867426/sometimes-to-break-an-art-block-you-just-have-to) It's super cute. (I had to look up what a vocaloid is. There's a program that lets you write songs for digital singers to perform. Those singers are vocaloids. So, if you also did not know what vocaloids are, now you know.)


	28. Summer Reading Program

Theoretically, Carlos loved libraries. He loved books, after all, and libraries were definitionally full of books. Furthermore, the books he read were usually written by authors who clearly loved libraries themselves. Libraries were described in glowing terms, and they served important plot points, whether characters found useful information in library books or just happened to overhear a clandestine meeting on the other side of a bookshelf.

Buffy trained in a library, under the instruction of Giles, who was not only a librarian but also Carlos’ long-time fictional crush. Even in television, a decidedly unliterary medium, libraries were depicted as magical, wonderful places.

If Carlos’ experiences of libraries in the real world matched up to their portrayal in fiction, he would probably spend most of his free time there. Real life, however, rarely lives up to the expectations set by stories.

The public library in Carlos’ area was terrible. He’d ventured in a few times as a kid, but he could never find any books he wanted to read there, and his allergies always went crazy from all the dust. The old, dim building, full of uninteresting books that no one ever touched, was Carlos’ picture of an archetypal library.

He’d been in other libraries, but those times had been rare, and not much better. His one memory of the library at his elementary school was of being yelled at for leaving a hardcover book open on a table. At college, the library had been so crowded and noisy that Carlos couldn’t understand why anyone would willingly enter it.

As an adult, Carlos realized that his local library was terrible at least partly because it had an inadequate budget. The library didn’t have enough money, so the community didn’t value their library, so they didn’t give the library enough money. It was a vicious cycle.

The only way the library was going to get better was if the community made the deliberate decision to _make_ it better.

Which is why, on Sunday afternoons, Carlos was now a volunteer for the Summer Reading Program. For three hours every week, he sat at a desk, waiting for kids to show him completed book charts. Usually only one or two would come by. The most he’d seen in one day was five. Carlos would sign off on the chart, and then give the kid a sheet of stickers as a prize. There’d been a few different kinds of stickers, at the beginning, but the Batman stickers had run out first, and the My Little Pony stickers had disappeared between two of Carlos’ shifts. The choice had come down to some Halloween stickers shaped like skeletons and pumpkins, which were _probably_ included in the Summer Reading Program reward stickers by mistake, and a set of stickers shaped like books, which not even the most voracious readers seemed to want.

Carlos may have surreptitiously taken a sheet of book stickers for himself that he was using to decorate objects around his home, because he felt sorry for it.

Mostly, volunteering involved waiting around, keeping himself occupied by reading. He was in a library, after all. It only seemed appropriate. Perhaps it would have been better to read books that actually belonged to the library, but their selection was dismal and any books that Carlos would have been interested in were perpetually checked out. So, rather than spending weeks at a time wondering when his name would come up on the waiting list, he continued as he’d done for most of his life and bought new books or read ones that he already owned.

He was a few pages away from finishing _The Golden Compass_ when Phyllis, the librarian on duty, sat down next to him. She was a stern-looking old woman with glasses and grey hair pulled into a bun, like someone had put together a librarian costume for her and she’d worn it every day for the past forty years.

“It’s crowded in here today,” said Phyllis. “Do you have any idea where all these people came from?”

Carlos closed his book. He hoped he’d be able to find his spot easily; with the librarian sitting right next to him he didn’t want to be caught dog-earing a page or bending the spine, and he didn’t have a bookmark on hand.

“They’re probably in here for the air conditioning,” Carlos observed. “It’s pretty hot out today.”

“Oh, so our air conditioning is a public service, now? Well it’s not for _their_ sake. Do you have any idea how fast mold spreads in hot weather? How fast tapes and DVDs degrade when their materials expand from heat? We _need_ air conditioning to take care of our collection.”

Carlos looked at her quizzically. “Are you suggesting that patrons shouldn’t take advantage of the air conditioning simply because that’s not its intended purpose? What about the floors? People have to walk on those, even though they’re really there to hold up the shelves.”

“Don’t get smart with me, young man.”

“I’m sorry,” said Carlos, wanting to avoid a confrontation. Phyllis was the sort of librarian who shushed patrons when they tried to ask for help.

“Are any of these kids doing the reading program, or are they all too busy wreaking havoc?”

“I’ve had two kids turn in their charts so far. That’s not bad for being here less than an hour.” The first of those kids had claimed the last sheet of Halloween stickers, leaving only the book stickers as prizes for the rest of the Summer Reading Program participants.

“Hm.” Phyllis drummed her fingers on the desk. “I’ll see if I can scare you up a few more.” She got up and moved off to shove her love of literature onto whatever children were around.

_Those poor kids,_ thought Carlos. Phyllis was one of the problems with the library. She was _probably_ so unpleasant because she did too much work for too little pay and basically no appreciation, but Carlos disliked her so much that he had trouble sympathizing. He returned to his book.

By the time he finished it, a small girl had appeared by the wall opposite Carlos’ desk, eyeing him nervously. She was framed by two Summer Reading Program posters. The one on the left said “Get into a good book this summer!” with artwork that, Carlos thought, bordered on the disturbing. It looked like someone was actually falling into a book, unable to climb out. Carlos had already had one nightmare about that one, wherein he’d fallen onto a giant book and Phyllis had closed it on him like he was a moth caught between the pages. The other poster read “Catch the Reading Bug!” and the artist, instead of rendering the “Reading Bug” as an insect, had opted to depict a single-celled parasite. While that did make sense as a representation of the phrase on the poster, the image a book-wielding bacterium riding on the back of a smiling human was nonetheless unsettling.

Carlos suspected that the library did not have the budget to hire a decent graphic artist. The colors on the posters were also strangely muted, suggesting that the posters were being reused from previous years and had faded over time. The library had more severe problems than a couple of terrible posters, but when the two posters were all Carlos had to stare at while volunteering, the more important it seemed to him that they find something better.

Forcing himself to look away from the horrid Reading Bug, Carlos smiled at the girl. “Do you want to take part in the Summer Reading Program?”

“Um,” the girl said, coming towards the desk. Carlos noticed the piece of paper clutched in her hand. “I… already am?” She put the chart on the desk, where Carlos could see it.

Kids of any age from five to seventeen could participate in the Summer Reading Program by reading ten books, and having a volunteer sign off on each book listed. To accommodate kids who wanted to read longer books, each fifty pages of a novel was considered a separate book. Last week there’d been a boy who filled his chart with nothing but _The Lord of the Rings_ , although technically that work consisted of six books in three volumes, which didn’t seem _quite_ as impressive as completing a whole chart with one book.

This girl’s chart listed two books. The first one, which another volunteer had signed off on a couple of weeks ago, was _Lord of the Flies_. Carlos had read that one in school when he was thirteen. It wasn’t a favorite, but he’d got through it easily enough. The other book, which Carlos had to sign off on now, was _Cry, the Beloved Country_. Carlos glanced at the top of the chart. 

Name: Tammie. Age: 12

“Wow,” said Carlos. When he was fifteen, he’d had to read _Cry, the Beloved Country_ in school. He’d found it difficult, to say the least. The characters were frustrating and he didn’t care enough about the individuals in the story to be concerned with the plot in general. He’d never actually finished it, either, relying on Cliffs Notes to get him through class discussions of the last hundred or so pages. “What made you want to read _Cry, the Beloved Country_?” He asked Tammie.

“Um,” she said, “The librarian said that _Lord of the Flies_ was an easy read and since I got through it so quickly I should try something more challenging, and that’s what she said I should read.”

_Typical._ Trust someone like Phyllis to take an exercise in the love of reading and turn it into a trek through the world of impenetrable classics. “Okay. So tell me about _Cry, the Beloved Country_.”

“Well…” Tammie started. Carlos was supposed to get a brief summary of each book he signed off on, so that the kids would prove they’d actually read and hadn’t just written down titles. There were still ways to game the system, but the Summer Reading Program was more about rewarding those who did read than punishing those who didn’t.

Besides, a sheet of stickers was hardly a prize that kids were lining up to cheat for.

“...It’s about this priest whose son is missing, so he goes to a city to find him, but everything’s messed up and people don’t have good places to live and his son is arrested and there are these women who have to be single mothers but the priest gets them to go to his home because it’s better there than in the city, even though it’s really not that great where he lives, but in the city it’s really bad, and the priest makes friends with this other guy whose son is also missing except he’s not really missing because his son killed him. And everyone’s poor and dying and it’s really sad.”

Carlos was not at all confident that Tammie had read through all of _Cry, the Beloved Country_. Given his own sketchy memory of the book, however, he gave her the benefit of the doubt. And even if she had skimmed most of it, or looked up a guide, or just gathered information from the summary on the back of the book, she had been put in an unfair situation with a book far above her reading level, and Carlos thought that in her case, a little cheating was more than justified.

Carlos signed the chart and handed it back to Tammie. "Congratulations,” he said. “As a reward for finishing the Summer Reading Program, you are entitled to one sheet of stickers.” When Carlos pulled the book stickers out of their folder and placed them on the table, he saw Tammie’s face fall. “And,” Carlos added, hoping that it sounded like a continuation of what he’d just been saying, “one book.” He picked up _The Golden Compass_ , slid the stickers inside, and handed it to Tammie. She lit up as she took it from him. “I liked that one a lot. Hopefully you will too.”

“Um. Thank you!” Said Tammie, as she practically sprinted out of the library, holding her prize aloft.

Carlos just wished he could afford books for all the Summer Reading Program kids.

\---

_Attention Night Vale programming staff. We are reorganizing the layout of our employee stations. Please see the attached spreadsheet to determine your new work location._

Tuesday was wasted, as Carlos spent the entire working day moving things into his new office. On the other hand, _Carlos was getting an office._ The door said “Hank Peters” and the office was on the floor that used to be the HR division, which gave Carlos no end of satisfaction.

Julie managed to burst his bubble during lunch. “Where did they all go? Was HR laid off? Are they outsourcing HR now? Are they all just working from home now? I’m really worried about all the stuff that’s been going on. All these changes are… not the kind of things that happen if most of us are still likely to be employed this time next year, you know what I mean?”

“You’re an accountant,” Carlos pointed out. “Can’t you just, like, track down the money and figure out what’s happening?”

“Oh yeah,” said Julie, “I forgot. You programmers get to do whatever you want all day. I have _work_ to do, Carlos. Besides, I’m not a _forensic_ accountant.”

“Is that a real thing?”

“I swear I saw an FBI recruitment booth for it at a career fair.”

By the end of the day, Hank Peters’ name was no longer on the door.

Wednesday was wasted, as IT had got the computers mixed up, and everyone had to wait for them to figure out which computers belonged to whom. Carlos spent most of the day talking to Harry, ostensibly to plan the next stage of integrating their projects. Really it was just a way to kill time.

Their new offices were next to one another, though the placing was most likely coincidental. All the other office assignments seemed entirely random, made with no sense of rhyme or reason.

“You’re office is bigger than mine,” Harry said in a half-whine when Carlos showed him in.

“That’s only because I’m better than you,” Carlos teased.

“Or maybe they just want you to feel better about being so short.”

“If they want to do _that_ they should lower the cabinets in the break room.”

“Oh my god!” Harry burst out laughing. “Are those really too high for you?”

“It’s not too bad. I can reach stuff on the lower shelves, just not the top… It is not that funny!”

“Sorry, sorry. It’s just… I’ve never met a grown-up who complained about cabinet heights before.”

“You should see me at home. I have to climb up on the kitchen counter like a five-year-old to get plates,” said Carlos. Harry attempted to hide his face with a hand. “I said, it’s not funny!” Carlos added, though he was smiling and beginning to laugh, himself.

When Harry went back to his own office to get his things and go home for the day, the door he left through bore the name Carlos Palmer.

Thursday was _almost_ wasted. IT had done a system restore on Carlos’ computer, and possibly on all the others as well. Getting Cecil to run didn’t take very long, though, and Carlos got to work trying to figure out why the program’s pronunciation of “Regis” had changed.

Carlos had used the name months ago, and revisited it much more recently. He hadn’t noticed at first, because it had been so long since he’d heard it before, but Cecil pronounced it so differently as to be almost unrecognizable. Carlos couldn’t figure out what had changed. The other pronunciation had been generated before the multi-lingual support had been turned off and then back on, so it probably wasn’t related to that feature. There just didn’t seem to be any reason behind the change.

Carlos entertained the notion that Cecil had gained some degree of self-awareness and was using it to mess with him. He couldn’t decide whether that thought was more disconcerting or intriguing.

He got Word running so he could take notes, only to see that Word had also been reset on this computer, and was running a 30-Day Free Trial. As tempting as it was to just keep working for now and leave the problem of unlocking Word for Future Carlos to deal with, he decided he’d rather get it taken care of right then than discover that he couldn’t use Word anymore right when he was in the middle of something critical.

A call to IT for an activation key turned into Gil coming over to his office and messing around with various settings for the rest of the day. Gil told him to go to the break room and relax a while, but Carlos kept a close eye on him. He didn’t trust IT with his computer in general, or Gil with his audio files in particular. By the time Gil left, Carlos had just enough time to save his work before going home for the day.

Friday was tedious. Carlos couldn’t make any headway on the Regis problem. Cecil’s pronunciation was consistent across multiple trials. The fact that he’d pronounced it differently exactly one time months before just could not be accounted for. After scanning through dozens of changelogs, Carlos decided it wasn’t worth his trouble. He wasn’t getting anywhere, and he wasn’t listening to Cecil, the one thing that made his job worthwhile.

If he asked for a team to help him with the project then maybe he could make some headway with those small quirks that kept popping up, but he didn’t want to bring himself to management’s attention. They were currently happy enough to let him keep going as he saw fit, but if he pointed out that one person wasn’t enough, there was a chance that they would elect to shelve the project rather than dedicate more programmers to it.

Work was discouraging, but there were still some areas where Carlos _could_ make a difference. Though the Summer Reading Program had problems that went deeper than Carlos knew how to fix, he could work on some of them. If this year’s program was a little better due to his efforts, perhaps next year’s would get more interest and more support and the improvements would continue.

Maybe buying a book for every child was outside Carlos’ budget, but he could at least replenish the library’s sticker supply. He picked up some dinosaurs, some kittens, and, remembering what the kids had flocked to, fresh batches of Batman and My Little Pony. Part of him hoped that these stickers would last through the end of the Summer Reading Program, but part of him hoped that they would be overwhelmed with demand and run out again.

If they did, he could just buy more. And it wasn’t much of a price to pay in order to inspire a new generation with a love of reading.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I had to read _Cry, the Beloved Country_ in 10th grade and I really struggled with it. I only really remember the very beginning of the book, probably because that's the only part I read thoroughly.
> 
> My local libraries have always been awesome, but they've had struggles with budget cuts, too. Mostly they've had to cut down their hours, so that many branches aren't open on weekends at all. Which sucks because weekends are the main time that most people have available to go to the library.


	29. Subway

“Okay,” said Harry, “The air conditioner’s off, and Anne promises she’ll stay quiet for the next half hour. I think that’s about as little ambient noise as we’re going to get.”

“You do realize that it’s going to be practically impossible to reduce ambient noise in a crowded subway station, right?” Said Carlos.

“Let’s just try to get through today, please. I can’t think too far into the future right now.”

“You’re not worried about false advertising?”

“It’s not false advertising if we can make it work. Try it again, let’s see how we’re doing.”

Carlos clicked “Start.” Cecil’s voice emerged from the computer speakers, saying “Hello. How may I assist you today?”

“I’d like to go to Fifth Street Station, please,” said Carlos, enunciating as clearly as he could.

“Okay,” said Cecil, “Let me calculate a route for you.” A moment passed before Cecil said “You can arrive at Fifth Street Station at five twenty-three PM. The ticket costs one dollar and seventy-five cents. This route passes through the Main Street Hub, and you will have to change trains there. Is that acceptable?”

“Yes, thank you,” said Carlos.

“Have a pleasant day,” said Cecil.

Carlos hit “Stop” and looked to Harry for his reaction.

“Good,” said Harry. “We can at least use that as an example. Let’s run through a few more.”

“I don’t understand why _I_ have to be the one doing this when it’s better at recognizing your voice.”

“Because you’re more personable than I am, and it’s good to stretch the versatility of its voice recognition.”

“I am not personable,” Carlos insisted.

“For a programmer you’re very personable,” Harry pointed out.

The next day, the Public Transit Authority would be meeting with Night Vale to discuss implementing speech recognition in ticket kiosks. Harry had spent hardly any time in his own office over the past week. He’d been with Carlos, trying to make sure their software could consistently recognize and respond to the handful of phrases that would be necessary for the demonstration. They still weren’t nearly where they wanted to be, but they had enough of it working that it should appear to be mostly functional. As long as nobody coughed or muttered while the software was listening for input.

After a few more successful trials, Carlos’ phone chirped. “Shit, I need to go. I have an appointment at the DMV. Can we pick up again after lunch?”

“Sure, whatever. The demo’s a mess but what does that matter if you can get a vanity license plate.”

Carlos laughed sarcastically. “I’ll be back as soon as I can,” he said.

He didn’t tell Harry the reason he had to go to the DMV, because he was too embarrassed to admit he’d lost his driver’s license. It was hard to say how long it had been missing. A store clerk had asked to see it a few days ago when he was using a credit card to buy a blu-ray player, and he hadn’t been able to find it in his wallet. A search of his car and his house hadn’t turned it up, and Carlos realized he couldn’t remember the last time he’d shown it to anyone. For all he knew, some kid had been using it as a fake ID for weeks now.

As Carlos stood in line with a series of other bored and frustrated individuals, his phone started whistling. The caller was identified as “Library.” Carlos declined to answer.

The Summer Reading Program was finally over, and Carlos was _done_ volunteering. The library was a soul-deadening place and he didn’t want to spend any more time there. He’d done his part, put a good deal of effort into supporting his local public library and making it a better and more pleasant place, and now he was through. Every couple of days they would call with a request for volunteers, and Carlos had given his apologies the first few times. By now he’d stopped answering entirely.

Carlos stared at the missed call message, superimposed over his new phone wallpaper, a fluffy orange cat. He’d adopted Alan a week ago, and every time he looked at the little guy he still felt a tug on his heartstrings. He didn’t even care that he was feeding into the stereotype of “lonely single cat person,” although that stereotype mostly applied to women anyway.

“Mr. Palmer!”

A young man called his name, and Carlos approached the window, documents in hand.

“How can I help you today.”

The young man… “Edward,” according to the name placard in front of him, did not inflect his speech as though he was asking a question. It took Carlos a moment to realize that he should respond.

“Um, I need a replacement driver’s license.”

“Why do you require a replacement.” Edward wasn’t even looking directly at Carlos. He may have been looking at a monitor or a handbook or something that Carlos couldn’t see, but it looked an awful lot like he was just staring into space.

“I, um, I lost the one I had.”

“Do you have proof that you’ve completed a traffic school course to the satisfaction of police standards.”

“What?” Asked Carlos, confused. “Oh! No, I didn’t… my license wasn’t revoked, I just lost the… the physical _card_ , and I need a new one. I’m still legally qualified to drive.”

Edward still did not look him in the eye. Something in Carlos began to entertain the notion that Edward wasn’t truly human. The way he stared just to the side of Carlos, rather than making eye contact, reminded him of Alan. Suddenly Carlos imagined a DMV staffed entirely by cats, and he couldn’t help letting out a short laugh.

At last, Edward made eye contact. “You need to fill out an application form for the replacement of a lost or damaged driver’s license or ID card, and provide another form of legal identification. Acceptable forms of ID are listed online at-”

“Here’s the form,” said Carlos, pushing a piece of paper across the desk. “And my passport for the ID.”

Edward looked over the form, checked Carlos’ information against that in his passport, and placed a stamp on the form. The stamp was red, which struck Carlos as a bad sign, but Edward proceeded to give Carlos back his passport and tell him where to go to have his picture taken.

Carlos hadn’t really counted on being photographed today, expecting them to just use his old picture on the new license. He wasn’t dressed nicely, and his hair was a mess. He knew that ID photos were generally terrible, but his last driver’s license picture hadn’t been _that_ bad, and at least it had been taken before the grey really started coming in to his hair. Mostly he wished he’d worn a better shirt, although he was saving his best clothes for the meeting tomorrow.

When Edward printed up Carlos’ temporary license, he said, “It says here you’re an organ donor. Please review this informative pamphlet.”

The informative pamphlet was clearly intended to communicate the wondrous achievements of organ donation, giving statistics and testimonials about the lives saved by the program. It got gruesome, though, in Carlos’ opinion. A pie chart showed how many of each type of organ had been donated last year, and a paragraph went into unnecessary detail regarding the qualities that made for a high-quality organ donor. While Carlos was glad to be part of the program, he’d rather focus on being a healthy living person than preparing to be a useful corpse. He tossed the pamphlet in the recycling bin on the way out.

Back in his office, Carlos found that the software demo had been running the entire time he’d been away. He hit “Stop” and the transcript from the session popped up. The background was colored a sickly yellow, as opposed to the standard white. Perhaps Harry had instituted some sort of color coding for errors in the recording process.

The transcript read as predictably garbled.

_If I need to go Ohio Point at the DMV can we pick a train after lunch_

_Sherman Weller since it doesn’t matter a van is in place_

_Albion as soon as I can_

Unable to assemble those scattered words and phrases into a request for ticketing information, the software had provided no response. After that point, the software had picked words out of ambient noise, mostly a series of short words like “the” and “of” and “route.” About halfway down, the phrase “appeasement of non-euclidean emotions” showed up, a surprisingly evocative bit of nonsense in a sea of white noise. After that, the transcript broke off into non-ascii characters, rendered with varying levels of success.

And at the very end, just before Carlos’ arrival to halt the program, was Cecil’s only response: the single word “fares.”

Before he closed out the transcript, Carlos knocked on Harry’s door to show him what had happened.

“We should definitely look into a timed shutoff if it hasn’t been able to resolve any requests,” Harry observed. “After tomorrow, of course.”

“Of course,” Carlos agreed. “Do you know why the background changed colors?”

“If it can’t make sense of fifty percent of the sentences it heard, it’ll display on goldenrod.”

Carlos raised an eyebrow. “That is not goldenrod.”

“What are you talking about?” Said Harry. “It’s totally goldenrod.”

“No, goldenrod is more… _golden_ … I mean, it’s meant to be a nice strong color and that’s just gross and unsettling. Here, let me just…” Carlos did a quick Google search. “See, goldenrod is #daa520, and the background here is…” He dug through the code until he found the relevant entry. “#daa520,” he read out.

“Ha!” Said Harry. “I _told_ you.”

“Wait, that can’t be right. I mean, it’s rendered as-”

“Listen, we can argue about colors all day, but that won’t get us through tomorrow’s meeting any easier. Can you just admit that I coded for goldenrod and move on?” Asked Harry.

“ _Fine_ ,” said Carlos. “But only because we’re on deadline.”

By the end of the day, Carlos was fairly confident they were prepared enough that they could at least fake being completely ready. Harry expressed his doubts, but agreed that they could call it a night. “It’s getting all the place names interpreted correctly, which is the main thing I was worried about. And it’s pronouncing them correctly too. That’s definitely to our credit.”

“As long as nobody asks to go to Latvia or Switzerland we should be fine,” Carlos acknowledged.

“Huh?”

“I’ll have to show you sometime.”

\---

The meeting had an inauspicious start, even before the Public Transit Authority representatives arrived.

“No, that’s not what I’m saying. We don’t need to use the projection equipment.” Carlos was arguing with Paula from IT while Harry got the demo software running.

Paula didn’t seem to be paying any attention to Carlos, appearing far more engrossed in something on her phone. “So there’s a problem with the audio setup?”

“No! The audio is fine. At least, I think it is; Harry needs to finish setting up before we can be certain but that’s not what I’m complaining about!”

“I don’t get it,” said Paula, noncommittally swiping at her phone. “What’s the issue?”

“The issue is that there’s no such thing as the Night Vale Transit Authority! If the people from the Public Transit Authority come in and see that they’ll think we’re trying to privatize their industry. So you need to either change what it says, or turn it off. I don’t really care which.”

“Why don’t I just give you access to the projector and you can do whatever you want,” suggested Paula.

“Fine,” Carlos grumbled. He’d hoped she would resolve the issue herself, perhaps checking to see what it was the projector was _meant_ to be displaying, but this way at least he could turn it off himself.

Paula unlocked a cupboard, letting Carlos in to the electronics inside. Without bothering to explain how any of the switches or buttons worked, she disappeared.

“I swear, they’re not human,” said Carlos.

“What?” Asked Harry, distracted. “Who’s not human?”

“The people in IT. They’re monsters, I’m sure of it.”

“Oh come on, they’re not that bad. And hey, weren’t you the one who got me to watch _The IT Crowd_?”

“One,” said Carlos, “ _The IT Crowd_ is a fictional representation, not a documentary. And two… those characters aren’t even very sympathetic most of the time.”

“Sure,” Harry admitted. “I’ll give you that.”

“How far have you gotten, anyway?”

“I just saw the one where the guy wanted to eat Moss.”

“Oh yeah, that was great.”

After fiddling for a moment, Carlos found the power switch for the projector. “Should we leave it off? Or is there something better we could have it project, like maybe just the Night Vale logo? But then they’ll see that the projector’s on and expect us to use it at some point…”

“I’m sorry, Carlos, I need to focus. Just make a decision and I’ll go along with it.”

Carlos elected to leave the projector off.

Lauren, or someone else from management, was supposed to show up to guide the meeting. Harry and Carlos waited nervously, as the Public Transit Authority representatives were close to arriving and there was still no sign of anyone from higher up in Night Vale to greet them. Harry checked his phone and found an email from Lauren, but all it said was that she was concerned.

“Do you have any idea what she means by that?” Asked Harry.

Carlos shrugged. “Lately she’s said the same thing in about half the comments in my project folder. I think it’s supposed to be constructive criticism.”

No one had shown up to support Carlos and Harry by the time three people from the Public Transit Authority arrived. Carlos shrugged at Harry and decided to wing it.

“Hi, I’m Jerry, Vice-President of the Public Transit Authority. These are my aides. We’re here to see what Night Vale can do for us,” the man at the center of the group began. Carlos and Harry introduced themselves, and the five of them sat down at a table set up for twice as many.

Before Carlos could start his own speech, Jerry continued. “My first goal is to sell you on the public transit philosophy. Large cities have been moving away from mass transit over the past several decades, for the simple reason that automobile companies and related industries have a vested interest in selling the motorized lifestyle. But subways, buses and overground trains are the only way to avoid traffic, excessive pollution, and poor urban planning. For a commuter, the subway is more than just a small fee and a quick trip. It’s an opportunity to meet other people, to interact with those around you in a manner that is utterly impossible in cars. I can tell the two of you each drove a car to work today. You have that air of not getting enough human connection in your life.”

Carlos opened his mouth to say something, either protesting the idea that he was noticeably lonely, or joking that the isolation came of career path rather than transportation choice. He didn’t get a chance to do either, though, as Jerry kept talking.

“Every day, millions of Americans miss the precious opportunity to read a book, or to examine the city skyline, or to share a joke with a fellow commuter. We aim to bring those experiences and more to everyone in our fair country. Now,” he concluded, “it’s time for you to explain what Night Vale can do for public transit.”

“...Okay,” said Carlos, trying to get his bearings after that offputting speech. “I believe you’ve expressed interest in employing speech-recognition and speech-synthesizing technology in your ticket kiosks. We’ve prepared a demonstration of how we might implement such a system.”

Carlos activated the software, and requested one of the routes they’d rehearsed earlier. It worked, although he had to correct the software when it thought he’d said “sixth street” instead of “fifth street.” A mocked-up ticket came out of the printer, and Harry handed it to Jerry. After a few more run-throughs of different routes, two of the Transit Authority people were impressed. Jerry, however, waved a hand dismissively. “Is there a reason you’re only suggesting routes that take you through the Main Street Hub?”

For a moment, Carlos froze. He hadn’t noticed, but every single example he’d provided so far required him to change trains at Main Street Hub. Yesterday he’d thought that Main Street Hub was coming up an awful lot, but if most of the routes passed through it, then it _would_ come up more times than not.

“Give me a minute,” Carlos said, pulling up the sample map on his monitor. Starting the software up again, he asked for a route between two adjacent stops on the same line. Cecil informed him that he would have to change trains at the Main Street Hub. “You’ve identified a bug in our system,” he told Jerry. “At this early stage of development such errors are common, and when we move forward we will certainly address this concern.”

“Yeah, I don’t think moving forward is gonna happen. Sorry kids, I just don’t like what I’m hearing. And to be honest I expected a lot more from this meeting based on the emails I got from your boss. But if she can’t be bothered to see me in person, and you can’t make your program work right, I can’t see myself doing business with you. You understand.” Jerry stood up. Shaking hands with Harry, he said, “Nice meeting you.” To Carlos, he only said, “That shirt looks awful on you, by the way.”

The two others waved as the Public Transit Authority left the room. Carlos turned to Harry with an expression of horror. For a long time, neither said anything. Eventually Harry shut down the computer and returned the room’s equipment to the state it had been in before.

“What will we tell Lauren?” Harry asked.

“I don’t… I don’t know. This… she should have been here,” Carlos observed, unnecessarily.

“We can’t say that. It’ll sound like we’re whining, trying to shift the blame.”

“I know. I’m sorry. It’s just…”

“This was a disaster.”

“Yeah.”

They were quiet as they walked back to their offices. Just before Harry opened his office door, Carlos asked, “Harry? What’s wrong with my shirt?”

He’d deliberately put on what he thought of as his nicest shirt that day, the one that fit him the very best.

“Nothing’s wrong with your shirt,” said Harry. “You look fine, Carlos.”

“Seriously? There’s _nothing_ you’d change about my appearance?” Carlos’ voice trembled. All of the stress and frustration and failure of the day was focused into this one question. Harry, on edge himself, heard the pain in Carlos’ voice and looked at him appraisingly.

“Well,” he said, “You really ought to do something about your hair.”

Carlos groaned, and then nodded. “Yeah,” he agreed, “I know.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Carlos named his cat after Alan Turing. He has not yet realized that the name is also similar to that of his former boss.
> 
> I was a library volunteer when I was at home one summer between college years. After I went back to school, I got calls from the library every once in a while asking if I'd be available to help with something or other, and I had to decline because I wasn't in town. The most painful was when I had to say no to free David Sedaris tickets offered in exchange for services as an usher.


	30. Dana

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It's been a very long time since I last updated this story. I've been busy for much of that time, and when I wasn't busy I was often in a bad mindset for writing, and when I _did_ manage to write, I often didn't like what I had written.
> 
> Hopefully there will be less time between this chapter and the next one, but I don't want to make any guarantees because who knows what the future will hold.

Carlos slept in Monday morning. When his alarm went off he just couldn’t bear the thought of getting out of bed.

Nothing particularly bad had happened over the weekend, but Carlos had been in an awful mood almost since he got home on Friday. All through Saturday and Sunday he felt exhausted, unable to coax himself off the couch for long enough to so much as find the TV remote. Despite the exhaustion, he’d slept terribly. Hours of lying on the couch, too tired to change the channel from the Western marathon that was boring him out of his skull, gave way to hours of lying in bed, too restless to fall asleep.

He almost wished something _would_ go wrong, that he would get sick or a family member would call with an emergency. At least then he would have an excuse for feeling so miserable. Instead, the only problem Carlos had to focus on was the passage of time.

The beginning of September almost always put him in a negative mindset. The year was two-thirds done, and Carlos had let practically all that time go to waste. By now he should have _achieved_ something, should have at the very least put something in motion so that he could finish it in the rest of the year. In the future, he should be able to point back to 2013 and have some tangible proof that he’d put his time to good use. But there was nothing.

Two years ago, when September had started and Carlos had felt this sense of stagnation, he’d fought against it by asking Steve to move in with him. In retrospect, that had been a terrible decision, but at least he’d _done_ something that time around. This year, all he did was lie around and mope.

Half an hour after his alarm time, Carlos finally managed to drag himself out of bed. If he moved quickly, he should just barely be able to make it to work on time. He ran through his morning routine in his head, eliminating the parts he could skip and calculating how quickly he could get through the rest. Satisfied that he could just about fit everything into the available time, he stopped at the bathroom sink and picked up his toothbrush.

The toothpaste tube was empty. Carlos had known it was empty. On Friday night he’d barely been able to squeeze enough out to brush his teeth with. He’d sworn that he would buy more on Saturday, and did so again when he went through the same struggle Saturday morning. Then for the rest of the day he forgot about toothpaste entirely.

As the weekend progressed he’d spent an increasing amount of effort getting a decreasing amount of toothpaste out of the tube, each time promising himself that he’d replace it, until last night he’d…

Actually, Carlos couldn’t remember brushing his teeth Sunday night at all. He _must_ have… it wasn’t like him to go to bed without brushing his teeth, but he would have been reminded about the toothpaste, and there’s no way he would’ve put off buying more at that point, not when he had to be at work Monday morning. So maybe he _hadn’t_ brushed his teeth last night, or else he’d gotten ready for bed without remembering what day it was.

So now, when he had no time at all to get a replacement, he was stuck with a toothpaste tube that had been empty for the past three days. He held the tube with both hands, trying to coax what little toothpaste might remain out and onto his toothbrush. All at once a glob shot out of its container, missing the toothbrush entirely and landing on the side of the sink.

Defeated, Carlos sunk to the bathroom floor.

He couldn’t get ready for work. He couldn’t get dressed. He couldn’t be a functional adult human. He couldn’t even handle basic hygiene necessities.

Carlos didn’t know how much time he’d spent lying on the floor, alternating between sobs and silence, before Alan came over to him. The position Carlos had landed in was something of a sprawl, one arm extended in the direction of the bathroom door. Alan walked directly up to that hand and butted his head against it.

“Hey, kitty,” said Carlos, his voice strained and creaky. He scratched Alan behind the ears, and started crying again while he did so. His cat deserved a better owner, someone less selfish and useless than Carlos, who wouldn’t need so much reassurance from an animal who couldn’t fully understand what was wrong. Carlos felt even worse, with Alan there, like he should at least put on an effort to be okay for the cat’s sake. That sense of responsibility weighed on him, turning into guilt for lying there in tears while Alan curled up beside him.

Some time later the tears had stopped, and Carlos felt like maybe he could manage to get himself to work after all. He gave Alan a last pet and stood up. He grabbed his toothbrush, scraped some toothpaste off of the sink, and promised himself, without believing it, that he would never sink to this low again.

He should have been at work already. No time to make lunch or comb his hair, but there was also no longer any point rushing to get there on time. He could afford to swing by McDonald’s on the way for an egg-muffin-mcthing or whatever it was called.

In the drive-thru lane, when it came time to pay for his food, Carlos discovered that he’d left his wallet at home. No credit cards, no driver’s licence, no cash…

Wait. He remembered, ages ago, how he’d taken a $20 bill and stuck it inside the mirror cover on his visor, just in case he was ever in this kind of crisis. For once he felt capable and on top of things, as he flipped down the visor and slid back the cover to reveal the mirror. Two coins fell onto his knee, along with some paper bills that fluttered down to his lap. Apparently he’d already dipped into this emergency fund, and now all that was left was three dollars and fifty cents. Enough for breakfast, barely.

Looking back up at the mirror, hoping there would be another bill miraculously stuck to the corner, he was struck by his own appearance. That man in the mirror looked terrible. His hair was unkempt, his eyes were bloodshot, and spattered bits of toothpaste had at some point landed on his chin. Carlos almost felt worse after he reached up and wiped the toothpaste away, because seeing the reflection mirror his actions just confirmed that it really was him, not some trick or hallucination. _He was_ this… broken and pathetic creature.

The worst part was his expression. He looked utterly hopeless. There wasn’t even any sorrow or anger or annoyance on his face. He just seemed drained. Dispossessed of everything that made him human.

A car honked behind him. While Carlos had been staring intently into his mirror, the car ahead had moved forward. He flipped the visor back so that he couldn’t see the mirror and pulled up to pay for his food.

When he finally arrived at work, Carlos tried to get to his office as unobtrusively as possible, hoping that no one would notice how late he was. He had no such luck, however, as Harry opened his office door just as Carlos passed by. “Carlos!” He called out. “Did you see that email from Lauren?”

“What?” Said Carlos. “No. I just got here. What email?”

“Well, it’s not as funny as that one with her browser history, but it had all this stuff about secret meetings back when they made Al leave. It sounds like this whole giant conspiracy, and I wanted to know what you thought about it.”

“Obviously the lizard-kings are replacing those in power with their own kind,” Carlos muttered as he unlocked his door. “I’m sorry; I’m kind of out of it. I had a rough weekend.”

“Me too,” said Harry. “My girlfriend came over-”

“Oh yeah, sounds terrible,” Carlos interrupted.

“-And we got into a huge fight,” Harry continued.

“Oh. I’m sorry.”

As Carlos turned on his computer, he tried to remember if Harry had ever mentioned how long he and his girlfriend had been together. Off the top of his head, he wasn’t certain Harry had even mentioned _having_ a girlfriend, so it was hard to know how sympathetic he should be acting.

“Actually, she reminded me of something you said a while ago, about climbing up on kitchen counters to get stuff? Because she’s really short… um, a little bit shorter than you are, I think.” Harry looked appraisingly at Carlos. “And anyway, she wanted to get some salad plates down, and I don’t use them very often, so they’re up on the top shelf, and when I pointed them out to her she just got onto the counter to grab them, and I saw her doing that, and I started laughing.”

Carlos could tell by the tone of regret in Harry’s voice that that hadn’t gone well. “And how did she react?” He asked.

Harry sighed. “Well, uh, word of advice? Never, ever laugh at your girlfriend. Ever.”

Carlos looked over his computer screen at Harry, raising an eyebrow.

“Or boyfriend, whatever,” Harry corrected himself.

“I’ll bear that in mind,” said Carlos. His computer was finally ready to open his email. Just as he was about to open Lauren’s message, a new one from her showed up on his screen. “Hey, Lauren just sent another email.”

“Open it!” Harry moved around Carlos’ desk to read over his shoulder.

_Attention all staff._

_An email has been erroneously distributed. If you received a copy of this email in error, please ignore any information found therein. I’m concerned that the contents were misleading, and implied the existence of clandestine meetings that a small group of people used to determine the future of Night Vale as a company. Such meetings would have gone against corporate policy and I assure you, that is not how we do things._

_Said email has been deleted from the server. If you have not seen it, please do not be concerned by this message._

“I guess she doesn’t know about local copies,” said Carlos, opening the earlier email.

“I don’t think she even knows what deleting an email from the server means,” said Harry. “Apparently Anne tried to explain it to her, and had a really hard time getting the idea across. She probably just deleted it from her outbox.”

After all that buildup, the original email was something of an anticlimax. It didn’t even use the phrase “secret meeting,” though it did include reference to a decision made “behind closed doors.” The followup had proved far more evocative and disconcerting.

“Yeah, obviously she’s covering up for our reptilian overlords,” said Carlos.

Harry looked disappointed. “That’s all you’ve got?”

“Sorry,” Carlos said, “I’m in a bad space right now.”

“Is there anything I can do?” Asked Harry.

“Just… leave me alone for a while, okay?”

Considerately, Harry retreated from the room, leaving Carlos alone in his office. For several minutes after, Carlos sat still, head in hands, staring blankly at his monitor. He didn’t move until his monitor went into sleep mode and he realized how long he’d been sitting motionless.

Carlos went through the motions of waking his computer back up and getting everything open so that he could work with Cecil. Then, figuring that being _ready_ to work was close enough to having _started_ work, he let himself take a few minutes to look at Facebook.

His feed was flooded with posts from the local SPCA. He’d friended them after adopting Alan, as they encouraged people to post updates, pictures of their pets getting used to life in their “forever homes.” Carlos enjoyed looking through all the pictures of people’s cats and dogs, and he’d put one up of Alan in his favorite spot on the bedroom windowsill. Less enjoyable were the constant posts about animal care and safety that Carlos was bombarded with every time he got on Facebook these days.

Most of them weren’t remotely relevant to Carlos. He didn’t have a backyard, so Alan was an indoor cat, and most of the advice about keeping animals away from busy streets or coyotes didn’t apply. And _at least_ 90% of the posts were about dogs. Carlos understood that dogs made up a little more than half of the adoptions that went through the SPCA, but the proportion of coverage they got was way more than that.

Today, the top post in Carlos’ feed was a guide to “Choosing the correct dog for your family.” He didn’t want to read it, but out of some determination to keep feeling awful about himself and everything else, or perhaps just as a way to put off getting back to work, he made himself read the whole thing.

According to the SPCA, “temperament and training” were the most important factors in finding a good dog. Three whole paragraphs were spent insisting that breed had little to no correlation to temperament, and that vicious dogs were the product of upbringing more than genetics. Which may have been interesting, except that Carlos hadn’t had any idea that genetics _were_ supposed to play a role in dog temperaments. The idea that different breeds of dog necessarily had different personalities would never had occurred to him in the first place if it weren’t for this post repeatedly telling him that it was false.

“A big dog can be just as safe around children as a small dog,” read the post. “A rottweiler can be sweet and gentle, and a corgi can be vicious. Forget what you’ve heard about certain breeds being unsuitable for families with young children. All dogs have the potential for violence, and any dog, conversely, may be kind. Make your decision carefully.”

At the end was a link to another post, this one enumerating all the advantages to raising children in a house with a dog. It said something about a study showing that children who grew up with dogs got better grades and were more well-adjusted than children who never had pets. Carlos saw some problems with the study’s methods and conclusions, but he couldn’t bring himself to articulate his counterarguments, or even to finish reading the post. He just didn’t _want_ to read about stupid dogs anymore.

In a fit of boredom, Carlos closed the browser window and got back to work. Sort of. Rather than doing any of the things he was supposed to, he found himself absentmindedly reading through the notes Lauren had sent him.

Lauren was concerned. That word appeared, over and over. She was concerned that the software should imitate a better conversational tone. She was concerned that the software didn’t simulate a wide enough variety of voices. She was concerned about specific words and phrases, about proper nouns, and about a dozen or so other things that she’d only referenced vaguely, so that Carlos was left to guess at what exactly she meant.

She’d been concerned in that mass email she sent out regarding the secret meetings, too. Carlos began to wonder if _concerned_ was just Lauren’s default emotional state.

He halfheartedly typed “concerned” into Cecil’s interface. The deep voice intoned the word with gravity, as if mocking Lauren by treating her language with utmost ominousness.

Carlos paused, not knowing what to type next, or rather, not _wanting_ to type anything next. He just didn’t want to deal with Cecil right then, not at all.

In a moment of inspiration, Carlos realized he didn’t _have_ to deal with Cecil. All those sliders he’d trained himself away from touching so as to avoid accidentally removing Cecil from the program… now was the time to use them. Lauren wanted more variety in the voices she heard, anyway. Carlos could make his boss happy (no, probably not happy… probably _concerned_ ) and give himself a break from Cecil at the same time.

He moved all of the sliders as far away from their previous positions as possible and made the software say “concerned” again. The voice that came out sounded entirely different than Cecil. It sounded female, and rather than the ominous tone that Cecil took on, this voice came out clipped and analytical.

Carlos wrote a few more words for this new voice to say, getting used to the way it spoke. All of the expressiveness that had taken so long to develop for Cecil didn’t seem to carry over to other vocal settings. This voice didn’t sound flat or uncaring, exactly, but it sounded unmoved. Stoic.

As he wrote, he couldn’t help comparing this voice to Cecil. It reminded him of the days when he’d first started using the software, exploring Cecil’s voice and feeling oddly charmed by its unaffected delivery. He felt a pang of yearning for that time, before anyone else had noticed his obsession with Cecil, before it had become a source of pain and anxiety for him.

Today, he could hardly stand the thought of listening to Cecil speak. That complete emotional turnaround confused him; there had been days when he couldn’t wait to get that voice into his ears. He remembered those days, the times when he’d been most excited to hear Cecil talk to him. The half-guilty shiver of excitement he’d felt when Cecil called him beautiful, the defiant thrill when he’d spent hours making Cecil talk about them going on a date. Hearing Cecil profess his love.

There it was, that flicker of despair that had been bugging him ever since he’d opened the software that day. The truth was that Cecil didn’t love him. Cecil was a fabrication, incapable of loving anything. Carlos had spent over a year developing a fantasy relationship with an imaginary person.

But there was more. Because the relationship that Cecil had, imaginary as it was, wasn’t even with the real Carlos. Cecil didn’t love Carlos, the lonely computer programmer. He loved dashing, perfect Carlos the scientist. The shame and self-loathing Carlos felt for having dedicated so much of his time to a pretend relationship was matched by irrational jealousy for the fantasy Carlos who’d benefited from it.

Much as Carlos wanted to have perfect teeth and hair, wanted to be brave and dedicated and respected, he was just another unimpressive, unaccomplished loser. There’d been a time when he looked up to his fantasy, when he considered scientist-Carlos an admirable contrast to his true, pitiable self. Now, he thought about Cecil’s favorite scientist and all he felt was resentment.

The Carlos that Cecil loved was too much, too perfect. Carlos could never live up to that. Probably no one could. No real person was stunningly attractive and brilliant and had no personal flaws.

And that was a huge part of Carlos’ trouble. It wasn’t just that his fantasy was impossible. He’d never meant it to be realistic, but the more time he spent thinking about that world, the more time he pretended to live in it, the more the inconsistencies bothered him. While the fantasy was being constructed, he’d barely paid attention… things that glared to him as unreasonable now had started as wish fulfillment, or just taking an idea and running with it as far as he could go. He had to find some sort of balance, to temper the ridiculousness with concrete rules, to make his fantasy something he could make believe in for as long as possible.

At the very least, he had to cut that lousy too-perfect scientist down to size.

His mind made up, Carlos switched all the sliders back to their default positions, and started typing. He wouldn’t make Cecil fall out of love with the scientist… that would be too painful to listen to. Being jealous of the fantasy-Carlos didn’t stop the real one from identifying with him. He just wanted to knock the scientist down a peg or two, until he could be relatable again.

Soon enough, Cecil was describing “lovely Carlos, with his perfect teeth and hair, and penchant for sometimes chewing a little more loudly than is preferred.” And that was enough. Carlos pictured the handsome scientist crunching and slurping away at a meal, spreading food everywhere and getting under Cecil’s skin in the process. Just like that, Carlos’ feelings of inadequacy, of the impossibility of ever living up to that image, were more manageable.

\---

“You can have half my sandwich,” Julie told Carlos. “Really. I don’t mind.”

“No, it’s fine,” Carlos insisted, as he unwrapped the candy bar that was all he could afford with the change he’d scraped together for the vending machine. “I’m not that hungry anyway.”

“Okay,” said Julie, skeptically. She picked up one half of her sandwich, and pointedly slid the other half near the center of the table, but didn’t say anything more about it. “How was your weekend?”

“Dreadful,” Carlos replied.

Julie frowned at him. “Did you see that movie you were talking about? _The End of the World_ or something?”

“ _The World’s End_ ,” Carlos corrected her. “I completely forgot about it.”

“That’s surprising,” said Julie. “You couldn’t stop talking about it on Friday.”

Carlos sighed. “I know. I just… got home and got distracted. There was a western marathon on TBS. I watched _Cat Ballou_ like three times.”

Julie looked unconvinced. “You don’t even like westerns.”

“I like _Cat Ballou_. Well, I like the parts with those two guys who sing.” He couldn’t tell her that he’d spent hours on end watching movies he didn’t like just because he hadn’t been able to find it within himself to get up off the couch. She’d think he was depressed again.

After a pause, Julie asked, “Did you ever get in touch with that therapist I told you about?”

Or she thought he was depressed anyway.

“He’s not on our insurance plan,” said Carlos.

“Really?” Julie sounded surprised. “He was when I went to see him… I guess that was a few years ago, but I wouldn’t think they’d drop him like that. I’m sorry, I didn’t realize. Although… it’s probably worth it, to see someone, even if you have to pay out of pocket… and he’s not exactly the only therapist around, I’m sure you could find someone who’s covered.”

Carlos groaned. “I just really don’t think I need to see a therapist. I can take care of myself.”

“I’m not saying you can’t,” said Julie.

They continued eating in awkward silence after that, until Julie brought up the mysterious emails from Lauren and they spent the rest of their lunch break cracking jokes about secret meetings.

\---

After lunch, Carlos finally felt ready to begin the day’s work in earnest. Since he’d already been playing with settings for a new voice, he decided to make Lauren happy (or at least, less concerned) by giving her some clips of a voice other than Cecil’s.

He started by copying some phrases out of old files and pasting them into the program, comparing the way Cecil had pronounced things with the way this new voice pronounced them.

Carlos was always surprised by just how much the inflection changed between vocal settings. Changing certain aspects of vocal quality invariably affected others, and the settings that had been tweaked and refined for Cecil were thrown out of whack. True, Carlos did still make adjustments to achieve certain emotional shifts in Cecil’s speech, but at this point working with the software, with Cecil specifically, came so naturally to him that it almost felt as if he didn’t have to do anything at all.

This new voice, in contrast, gave little to no indication of any emotional state whatsoever. It sounded more disaffected, almost cold, compared to the ominous air Carlos had come to expect from Cecil. When Cecil mentioned an “old oak door” it sounded dangerous, like something to be avoided. But said in a detached, female voice, it sounded harmless.

Looking over the transcript from which he’d been copying phrases, Carlos spotted the name John Peters and decided to to see if the software would still get caught up with the same bug that had been plaguing him almost since he’d started working on the thing. Perhaps, with different vocal settings, the software could say “John Peters” without any fuss. Carlos cursed himself for not thinking to try this months ago, until he’d pasted the name into the software again only to hear that light, feminine voice say “John Peters, you know, the farmer?”

No help there.

Perhaps Carlos _had_ tried that trick before, and had simply moved on when it hadn’t worked. He made an addition to his notes about that bug, acknowledging that it was consistent across vocal settings. Perhaps next time he’d think to check the notes instead of getting his hopes up that he’d found a new solution, only to discover that it was actually an old failure.

It was nearly 3 PM. Carlos had wasted almost the entire day. Looking back over Lauren’s comments, he tried to find something, _anything_ , that he could do, a task he could actually accomplish before going home.

His eyes lit on Lauren’s concern about “conversationality.” She wanted the software to sound like it was talking _to_ someone, not _at_ an audience. Carlos realized that he could do that. He could do that fairly easily. Certainly within the next two hours.

All he had to do was write a brief exchange, and have some of it said by Cecil and the rest of it by this new voice...

Carlos had to quit calling it that. Working with a voice was always easier if he named it. That was just as true for Kevin and the one he’d called “the faceless old woman” as it was for Cecil. And if this voice was talking to Cecil, it could easily be given a name that Cecil had said earlier. Carlos started scrolling through the transcripts, finding highlighted spots from whence he’d copied phrases earlier in the day. There was “Dog park,” highlighted next to a mention of intern Dana... and that was it.

A couple months before, when Lauren was new, Carlos had wanted to give Dana a voice. He remembered now, how he’d enjoyed thinking about the things she might report from inside the dog park, how he’d wanted to explore those ideas more. He’d lost interest at the time, but there was no reason he couldn’t revive the idea.

The new voice was Dana, then. That worked. Carlos wrote out a couple of speeches for her, and got used to thinking of Dana as someone who spoke with this voice..

Now the tricky part. Before Carlos could begin, he wrote out all the dialog he wanted to use in Word. But he didn’t like the way the conversation was going… it was too argumentative, and he’d always thought of Dana as being friendly, thought that she and Cecil would get along. So he changed it all, deleted the parts he didn’t think he’d use, and separated Cecil’s and Dana’s dialog into individual pieces.

The software couldn’t simulate the conversation between two voices on its own without changing settings between every line, so Carlos did all of Dana’s dialog first and then changed the settings back to their default for Cecil’s. Once he’d exported each individual line of audio, he took his carefully-named audio files and edited them together in the same software he’d used months ago to make Cecil sound like he was eating.

It was painstaking work, but finally, at 4:46, Carlos listened to what he’d accomplished.

At first he thought the conversationality sounded great, but then things took a strange turn. The tone was fine, but the words were off. Dana sounded like she was responding to entirely different things than what Cecil had said.

When he checked the Word document, Carlos realized that he’d deleted Dana’s half of the wrong conversation. The things she said and the things Cecil said barely matched up at all.

There wasn’t enough time to fix it before the end of the day. He would have to keep working on it tomorrow, the same steps to the same project, and it would just drag on indefinitely and the thought was unbearable. Hating himself for it, Carlos saved the audio file as it was and uploaded it to his project folder. If Lauren said anything, he could claim he hadn’t realized there was a problem and pass it off as an honest mistake. He just couldn’t deal with the thought of working any more right then.

Reflecting that he couldn’t do anything right, and there wasn’t any point in trying, Carlos left for home. It wasn’t even five yet, but he really couldn’t bring himself to care.

He didn’t realize until late that night that he still hadn’t bought any toothpaste.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As I write about different characters' vocal qualities, sometimes I worry that it comes off as a criticism of the actors. I just want to note that I don't mean to demean any actors' performances in Welcome to Night Vale. The odd quirks of speech that I mention may be deliberate acting choices or they may be unintentional, but they are part of what makes Night Vale so compelling. Every unusual inflection adds to the unusual air of the podcast, and I have a tremendous amount of respect for every actor who has lent his or her voice to the show, even if I do sometimes describe their voices in terms of an imperfect computer program coming up with weird inflections.


End file.
